How John Lapinski and a Squad of Penn Faculty and Students Backing

How John Lapinski and a squad of Penn faculty and students backing him up on the NBC News Decision Desk navigated an election season that was unprecedented— and could set a pattern for the future. By Alyson Krueger

just needed to hear John’s voice in throughout the process decision desk ently. The political and data scientists my ear,” recalls Rashida Jones, the staff also use exit polls and other data to had to ask themselves endless variations NBC News senior vice president generate graphs, charts, and blog posts of questions like, “If Democrats in Ari- “I in charge of election coverage. to explain what is happening in various zona’s Maricopa County are mostly vot- It was Saturday morning, November 7, contests, such as how votes broke down ing by mail rather in person, what types 2020—four days after the polls closed— by gender or race. of votes are still outstanding?” and the winner had yet to be declared in Based on the states that had already On that Saturday morning, Jones, who the presidential election between Donald been called, NBC’s electoral college count has since been promoted to president of Trump W’68 and Joe Biden Hon’13. stood at 253–214 in Biden’s favor, with MSNBC, had an idea that a vote dump was As it had been since November 4, the Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, coming in from Pennsylvania that might NBC News Decision Desk team—led by and Pennsylvania still undeclared. put the call for that state’s 20 electoral col- director of elections John Lapinski, the While the goal is to project a winner lege votes over the edge, pushing Biden Robert A. Fox Professor of Political Sci- sooner rather than later, based on analysis past the 270 threshold to win. But she ence and director of the Penn Program of votes collected from key counties across needed to hear Lapinski’s voice to make on Opinion Research and Election Stud- the country, the threshold for making a call sure. “He gave us his marching orders,” she ies (PORES)—was gathered in a make- is always high—and never more so than in says. NBC then publicly declared the win shift space inside the Comcast Center in the polarized, pandemic-scrambled elec- for Biden (seconds after CNN at 11:24 a.m.), Philadelphia, analyzing returns to make tion of 2020. “We have to be 99.5 percent and by 11:40 a.m. the Associated Press and projections for the presidential and conﬁ dent to project,” says Lapinski. other networks had followed suit. other still-undecided races to be used by Voting patterns from past elections As images of celebrating Biden support- the network’s various broadcast TV, ca- were of limited help this time around, ers and protesting Trump followers ﬁ lled ble, and streaming platforms. since changes sparked by the pandem- the airwaves, Lapinski and his soldiers At that point, the 44 members of NBC’s ic—in particular, growth in the use of resumed counting. “We still had a bunch election night operation—20 of whom mail-in ballots—combined with Presi- of other races like Nevada to call,” he says. were Penn professors or students—had dent Trump’s attempts to cast doubt on (That happened around 2 p.m.) The last been up nearly 24 hours a day for four those ballots and undermine faith in the calls in the presidential race didn’t come days straight. Besides calling races, election, caused voters to behave diff er- until November 13—North Carolina for

46 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Mar| Apr 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY LINCOLN AGNEW Mar| Apr 2021 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE 47 Trump, Georgia for Biden—to bring the This year the media’s role became even diff erent analysis tools, to build as we went fi nal electoral vote tally to 306–232. more important, because another po- along” to deal with the fragmentation of There was other news out of Georgia, litical tradition was breached. “There the electorate—into in-person Election too, of course, where both of the state’s used to be this idea that the way we could Day voters; early mail-in voters; and same- Senate elections were headed for runoff s, also know who won the presidency is day mail-in voters or people who dropped after incumbent Republican Senator Da- when the other person conceded,” says off their absentee ballot at polling sites (a vid Perdue fell short of 50 percent of the Conway, which Trump refused to do. category that didn’t really exist before vote versus Democrat Jon Ossoff while That put additional pressure on elec- 2020)—and create responsive forecasting Democrat Raphael Warnock and Kelly tion arbiters like Lapinski and his team. models. “The good news is we had such an Loeffl er, a Republican appointed to the “I don’t want to be melodramatic, but if experienced, talented team that we knew seat in 2019, were the top two vote-getters we screw this up it can be very damaging how to do that. We were rock solid in this.” in a multi-candidate fi eld. Both runoff s for our democracy,” he says. “No one Going forward, Lapinski would like to promised to determine the nation’s trajec- wants to get into a Constitutional crisis.” have better ways to track exactly what type tory for the next four years, with control And not screwing up is getting harder. of vote is coming in and how much is out- of the US Senate hanging in the balance. In order to make a projection the deci- standing, especially in swing states. “You sion desk must collect voting results from have to put a lot of resources into being ne of the more idiosyncratic aspects county offi cials and precincts across the able to do that because it’s a job that takes of the US presidential electoral sys- country. But many of those places have people power,” he said. “But NBC has al- tem is that there is no centralized, proven unwilling or unable to count their ready told me they are investing their re- governmental body that determines votes, especially absentee ballots, as ear- sources in this. They want to get it right.” every county and state’s votes on ly as possible, leading to longer days or Oelection night. Each state certifi es its weeks for those calling the races. hile he was growing up in Seattle, election results on a diff erent timeline “The reason the election wasn’t called Lapinski’s grandmother inspired and their votes are formally cast when on election night 2020 is because the his love of the news. “I would watch the electoral college convenes a month COVID-19 pandemic meant so many bal- television with my grandma,” he or so after the election. The results are lots were mailed in or dropped off , and says. “That was the Tom Brokaw, then sent to Washington and tallied in a many state legislatures’ laws prohibited WDan Rather days. They were big deals.” January 6 joint session of Congress counting those ballots until polls had He was the fi rst in his family to go to (which we learned this year, all too clear- closed. There was a huge backlog that college, completing his undergraduate ly, isn’t always a mere formality.) took time to get through,” says Emily degree at the University of Washington, That leaves a big gap that the media VanDerWerff , a television critic for Vox where he studied political science. He long ago stepped in to fi ll. who wrote a column that advocated get- followed that up with a master’s degree “In the ’50s and ’60s people used to ting rid of election night programming in public policy at the University of Chi- fl ock to their local newspapers to fi nd out because of this reality. cago, with the help of a full scholarship. who won on election night,” says Michael Even without deliberate delays, local “That’s when I realized I had abilities Conway, a television news historian and election offi cials focused on counting the with numbers and when I started getting associate professor of journalism at Indi- vote don’t always provide the most trans- a lot of statistics training,” he says. ana University. “They were the ones who parent or thorough information to jour- He received his PhD in 2000 from Co- got those numbers and counted them nalists, leaving decision desks unclear lumbia University and taught at Yale fi rst.” (Political parties and candidates about which votes are left to count and before coming to Penn in 2006. also do their own counting, but they can what kind of votes they are. MSNBC Lapinski teaches political science class- be biased.) While wire services like the analyst “Steve Kornacki was calling Ful- es, especially those within the depart- Associated Press—which has been calling ton County himself this year while he ment’s data science minor, and is also the elections since 1848—and major newspa- was on air” trying to get some answers, faculty director of the Fox Leadership pers remain sources, eventually the ac- says Stephanie Perry, manager of polling Program and of the Executive Masters of tion moved mostly to TV, fi rst with the for NBC News and a member of the deci- Public Administration program at the broadcast networks’ election night cover- sion desk. “We need to reimagine the way Fels Institute of Government. That’s in age, then the addition of news-focused we get the most up-to-date information.” addition to heading up PORES. The pro- cable channels, and more recently the “This year really did feel super, super gram’s mission is simple, he says: “We plethora of digital properties off ering crazy,” says Lapinski. “On the fl y we had train students how to analyze and think political coverage on the internet. to come up with diff erent types of models, about problems using numbers.”

48 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Mar| Apr 2021 John Lapinski

When he’s not pulling all-nighters at the decision desk, Lapinski’s scholarship focuses on using data analysis to understand national elections and Congres- sional lawmaking. He is the author of The Substance of Representation: Con- gress, American Political Development, and Lawmaking (Princeton University Press, 2013) and a coauthor of Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction (also from Prince- ton, 2018). Currently, Lapinski is working on a report for the American Association for Public Opinion Research, scheduled for release this spring in time for the group’s annual conference, about how to im- “I got to NBC News by accident,” says Lapinski. “We now run a lot of dif- prove polls. “We need to rethink how it says Lapinski. Just as he was fi nishing up ferent types of models to see if they pro- is done, how to do it better, but also how his PhD at Columbia and starting at Yale, duce the same result. If there is one that the media should be using it,” he says. he aimed to do a big survey studying doesn’t, we don’t call the race. Instead of “People are so obsessed with the num- people’s attitudes about politics. He want- assuming that model is the outlier like bers, who is going to win, but the media ed to conduct the poll on MSNBC.com they might have in the past, we say it can be doing a better job about how we and was put in touch with the director might be the right one.” report out poll numbers.” of elections at NBC. “He told me my proj- Another big change at decision desks is Among the biggest fl aws he identifi es ect was crap, but he grilled me for a long how much data with which they have to is lack of participation among certain time,” Lapinski says. “Two weeks later work. “There have been leaps and bounds populations, which skews the results. he called me and asked me to be an ana- in data science from what we had in 2000 For example, far-right voters, who dis- lyst on the decision desk.” to now,” says Lapinski. “It’s light years. We trust mainstream media and political His fi rst election was the Bush–Gore have so much data, that we have to make organizations, won’t usually answer the race that ended up in the Supreme sure not to get saturated and inundated phone for pollsters. “There are two ways Court. “They sent me home early,” Lap- in it.” For example, decision desks used to to think about this,” says Lapinski. “We inski remembers. “Only when I woke up only get data at the county level. Now it can fi gure out how to get more people in the next day did I realize all the crazy is broken down into precincts, which the polls. Or we can make some improve- stuff that went on.” means it is much more granular, and the ments in how we statistically weigh the NBC, along with other networks, faced forecasting can be more precise. data, but we have to understand these backlash from that election after calling people better and how they behave be- Florida for Gore early in the night, re- By 2013 Lapinski was leading the fore we do that.” tracting the projection, calling the state decision desk, a position that allowed Another issue is predicting the com- for Bush, and taking that back in the him to staff the team with his people. He position of the electorate—how many predawn hours when it became clear turned to Penn. For the 2020 general elec- Democrats and Republicans will vote? there would be a recount. tion, there were nine Penn faculty or staff This has been a problem for pollsters “The 2000 election led to new innova- members working the decision desk. in both 2016 and 2020, with Trump on tions and new approaches in thinking Every election year Lapinski also the ballot, but may well also continue about data,” says Lapinski. “When you brings in undergraduate interns—in in the future. “Probably what we will make a mistake that big, you get a little 2020 there were 11—who work on input- end up doing is to move away from hav- more cautious.” ting exit poll data, building graphs for ing one hard number to having multiple Decision desks run simultaneous mod- use on air, fact-checking numbers, and numbers,” says Lapinski. “We will say els to see what outcome they predict. In getting vote counts from county and if the electorate looks like this, this is 2000, they only ran a few of these. Now, state websites. what will happen. If it looks like B, this they use at least 20, “and we run them College junior Leonard Chen, who is a will happen.” millions and millions of times a night,” philosophy, politics, and economics

Photo by Andrew Arenge Mar| Apr 2021 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE 49 (PPE) major, “was pretty shocked” when ing at, and what we have and don’t have and know that elections will be called he was asked to join the team, he says. in the moment,” says Perry. “And these over the span of multiple nights.” Election night was a whirlwind. “You tools need to help us make it reportable know that feeling in your chest when to the American public.” January 6, Lapinski was back at you are on a roller coaster?” says Chen. Exit polls have also gotten more com- the Comcast Center collecting “That’s what it felt like.” He was assigned plicated to analyze. In 2020, “there were votes from county precincts in the task of making graphics and then a lot of issues with how people respond- On Georgia, where results of the checking them on air. “There is a lot of ed to polls,” Lapinski says. For example, previous day’s runoff elections were con- scrambling, a lot of yelling, but you get it’s no longer helpful to just poll voters tinuing to be tallied. The Warnock–Loef- used to it.” who show up on Election Day, because fl er race had already been called in War- Besides the adrenaline rush, riding the they act very diff erently than people who nock’s favor in the wee hours, but the roller coaster could also lead to a job in vote early by mail (who act diff erently contest between Perdue and Ossoff was the future. NBC hires many of the interns than people who vote early in person). still offi cially in doubt. that come through the program, Jones “Now you have three electorates,” he says. The night before, it seemed the entire says. “You can teach data analysis in the One thing the 2020 election made country had been glued to their various classroom, but it’s another thing to have clear is that the audience of politics- screens waiting for a winner. But when these students have the live experience consuming Americans has a healthy—or night turned into day, a fresh news of knowing how television works.” maybe not healthy, but voracious—ap- story took center stage: Trump support- According to Tom Jones, a senior writ- petite for watching geeky broadcasters ers had violently stormed the Capitol er for the Poynter Institute for Media operate digital displays and talk num- as Congress was in the process of certi- Studies, decision desks are more impor- bers for days on end. “I was with other fying the election. tant than ever. “They need to stick to the professors who study the media, and The majority of NBC’s team turned its same mission of calling the results and they were yelling at the television attention to that shocking development. making the projections when they are screen: ‘Where are the numbers? Why But as the leader of the decision desk, ready to be called,” he says. “That’s nev- aren’t there more numbers?’” says Indi- Lapinski’s job was to keep counting. er been more important than now, when ana University TV historian and journal- “It was kind of surreal,” he says. “As I’m so many Americans, because of the lies ism professor Conway. looking at votes, out of the corner of my they’ve been told that our elections Witness the reports that The Gap sold eye I see police pulling guns at protest- could be rigged, don’t have 100 percent out of khaki pants—signature attire of ers who have breached the Capitol.” confi dence in election results.” MSNBC’s boyish on-air data analyst “We called the race at 4:06 p.m.,” says The problem is that forecasting re- Steve Kornacki, who was also named one Perry, “but it didn’t even matter—it mat- quires an understanding of how the elec- of the sexiest men alive by People maga- tered ultimately, but not on the day we torate behaves, how certain people in a zine. (“There is now hope for all of us,” called it.” At the time, the projection wasn’t certain place at a certain time will vote. jokes Lapinski.) even announced on live television, only And a lot of that has changed. “If 2020 is More seriously, he has some ideas online through social and digital channels. any indication, elections have entered a about how networks should make use of But once the Capitol was secure and new phase,” says MSNBC’s Jones. that attention, beyond treating the ups Congress resumed its electoral vote Perry agrees: “These races are now go- and downs of election night (or week) count, the results were waiting that the ing to be a lot harder to call.” number-crunching as if it was a football two Democrats had won their Georgia Election analysts need a way to iden- game. “We have to come to a place where elections, creating a Democratic major- tify what kind of votes are coming in at people’s faith in the system is restored ity in the Senate with Vice President any given time and account for those and people start trusting it,” he says. “I Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote. diff erences. “It’s not just that mail-in bal- think there is still a lot to learn, and I am And viewers could rest assured the an- lots are diff erent from in-person ballots,” not sure it’s fully fi xable. But we are at nouncement was accurate. “I wouldn’t Lapinski says. “Diff erent types of mail-in the beginning stages of at least trying.” say that we waited much longer than ballots were diff erent. The ones that More basically, people’s idea of “elec- being 99.5 percent sure Ossoff would were dropped off on Election Day looked tion night” may have to change. “If ev- win, but we pushed it a little beyond so diff erent from the ones that came in ery contest takes three or four days, we that,” says Lapinski. “This call, there was two days earlier.” all can’t physically stay up for that long no way we could get that wrong.” “We have to design and develop tools to cover those,” he said. “We are going to to help us understand what we are look- have to teach people to be more patient Alyson Krueger C’07 writes frequently for the Gazette.

50 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Mar| Apr 2021