How John Lapinski and a Squad of Penn Faculty and Students Backing
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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.