Edited by Julia Hanna; photo by Chris Sorensen

I remember watching the Kennedy-Nixon debate when I was five years old. In 1964, I distributed leaflets in my neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, for the presidential campaign. I was nine and “all the way with LBJ.” I guess it started back then.

My major in college was mathematics. I’m really interested in politics, and I’m really interested in analytic thinking. Data journalism feels like the ultimate place where politics and math meet.

For a while I worked for David Garth on different campaigns, including Jay Rockefeller and Robert Byrd’s reelection campaigns in West Virginia. Garth was a bit of a pioneer in the field of political consulting. I also worked at NBC, and then decided with all the changes in that industry I’d better get a grounding in business.

I liked opening cases at HBS, which I know you’re not supposed to. So many cases are analytic problems, where you need to think not just about the data but also its implications and the question you’re asking.

I was recently in a meeting about redesigning a poll to give an indication—not an absolute conclusion—of which party will control Congress in November. I said, “Remember the question we’re trying to answer.” It was the HBS guy saying that.

Consulting is very similar to journalism, because you go into a new situation or a new company and try to figure out what makes a place tick. It’s like the blind person touching different parts of the elephant and trying to make sense of the whole.

When Trump had a horrible news week, we saw in the polls that Hillary Clinton didn’t make any gains as a result of his missteps. The joke I used to make about the 2016 presidential election is, “We were shocked but not surprised.”

Our work is a team effort. The approach is to just focus on the numbers. The winner is defined by whomever the state certifies. We’re there to report what we’re seeing and to ignore the nonsense that’s going on outside.

Black, stale coffee is my beverage of choice on election night. Fox recently made a major upgrade with coffee services. I remember thinking, “No, it’s not a real election night unless the coffee is stale.”

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