Politics & Polls #207: The Fox News Analyst Who Will Call the 2020 Election (Arnon Mishkin)

Oct 28 2020
By B. Rose Huber
Topics Politics
Source Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

Election day is less than a week away, and early mail-in and absentee ballots account for more than 70 million votes to date. Given the unique circumstances of this year's election, will the returns that day reflect the final outcome? How will the media accurately cover this historic election day?
 
At the heart of every news network is the decision desk, a team of experts that analyzes and projects election winners. In this episode, Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang interview Arnon Mishkin, the Fox News analyst who leads the team that will call the election for the network.
 
Mishkin is director of the Fox News decision desk. Formerly a partner of The Boston Consulting Group and Mitchell Madison Group, he currently leads Mishkin Associates, advising clients on issues of core strategy, marketing, and targeting.

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Wang is a professor at Princeton University, appointed in neuroscience with affiliate appointments in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Center for Information Technology Policy. An alumnus of Caltech, where he received a B.S. with honors in physics, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University Medical Center and at Bell Labs Lucent Technologies. He has also worked on science and education policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. He is noted for his application of data analytics and poll aggregation to American politics. He is leading an effort at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to build a 50-state data resource for legislative-quality citizen redistricting. His work to define a state-level legal theory to limit partisan gerrymandering recently won Common Cause’s Gerrymandering Standard Writing Contest. His neuroscience research concerns how the brain learns from sensory experience in early life, adulthood and autism.

Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He has written more than 900 op-eds, including his popular weekly column for CNN.com and The Atlantic. This year, he is the distinguished senior fellow at the New York Historical Society, where he is writing a biography of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for Yale University's Jewish Lives Series. He is the author and editor of more than 19 books including, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society,” the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress. In January 2019, Norton published his new book, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.” In spring 2020, Penguin Press will publish his other book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.” He has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation and New America.