Welcome to Strength In Numbers!
This Substack is written by me, G. Elliott Morris, a data-driven journalist and author based in Washington, DC. I write about demographics and elections, public opinion polling and democracy, and how people live generally — all from an empirical angle.
Strength In Numbers shares the same name as my book on polling and democracy. It is faster-paced, more newsy, editorial, and opinionated when warranted (especially about representation), but generally devoted to a similar set of principles: Above all, that through careful empirical analysis, we can approximate more objective truths about politics, political behavior, and the world than we can through punditry; And second, that independent, unbiased data on public opinion is critical for holding leaders accountable when they stray too far from the will of the average American.
If you believe in the power of data (ahem, the strength in numbers), join our community:
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Why Subscribe?
By signing up to get Strength in Numbers in your inbox, you’ll get:
All readers to Strength In Numbers get (at least 1x/week):
My goal is to keep the best and most newsy work free for Strength In Numbers free to read. That work will include:
Evidence-based analysis of politics, economics, and the news. The bread and butter of my work is “news analysis” pieces that explore nuanced topics with statistical models and data visualization. I dive into the crosstabs myself, boot up the academic data, and come to objective conclusions about the issues animating political discourse today.
Weekly chart-based articles about the latest political news in the U.S., and sometimes globally. The idea is to provide something you can’t get anywhere else. And I know your inboxes are full already, and a picture is worth a thousand words.
Polling aggregation and election forecasts with open-source methodologies, including code. Averaging and forecasting are key tools for understanding the signal in the polling noise, and how precise those signals are. But both pollsters and forecasters have suffered from loss of credibility recently. Transparency is one way to enhance trust. I will publish topline forecasts for a public audience, and save crosstab and finer-resolution models for paying subscribers.
Live election-night models and threads about results. For major contests with comprehensive county-level results, I will produce benchmarks for each candidate ahead of the election and compare results on the night of to figure out who is ahead. This method usually identifies the likely winner of an election before major networks can call the race.
Other data-driven products about economics and politics, such as the index of economic growth that I use to forecast election outcomes, and my Cost of Ruling Index that measures how bad the political environment is for the incumbent party. And I’ve worked on other potential products, too, like a calculation of how much excess value each Congressional member provides to their party. (Suggestions for other trackers are welcome.)
Paying subscribers to Strength In Numbers get (2-3x/wk):
The satisfaction that comes with supporting the public work of this newsletter. I have to pay my bills, and you make this analysis possible to do publicly and independently. Thank you!
Subscriber-only analyses of elections and polling trends, cutting through the noise and confusion of daily media cycles. These are short daily-ish articles (what some people would call “takes”) where you get my analysis and opinions on important issues. These are posted to a paywalled section of the Strength In Numbers website, and exclusive for people who support the mission of this publication.
Enhanced forecasts and polling averages, including crosstab-level averages and election forecast data at the state and local levels. I may make presidential forecasts and toplines free, while paywalling Senate and House forecast details, for example.
Other one-off data products from this newsletter that require more than the average work to produce. Basically the idea is that if a number is in the public interest to see, it should be free. Otherwise, I need to charge some amount of money for it to support this blog as a full-time job.
Opportunities to engage directly with me and a community of informed readers who value thoughtful, evidence-based political analysis. Readers participate in an active chat here on Substack, where anyone can start any discussion with other readers, and I plan to engage with you personally in other ways too — likely with Q&A/mailbag posts (which have been popular before), reader polls, and posts by guest authors (hopefully some of them by some of you!). I plan to host more live chats on Substack, and if size permits, paywall comments for paying subscribers.
Timing
The plan is that subscribers will receive emails from me 1-3x a week on average, depending on the news and your subscription level: On Monday, I will publish a short subscriber-only “take” to add context to any news that happened over the weekend, when needed. Tuesday morning, all subscribers will receive a data-driven analysis around the length of a typical newspaper column; During election season, Wednesday mornings (sometimes late Tuesday night) are reserved for coverage of the previous day’s contests, which I paywall halfway through the piece for premium subscribers; Thursday is reserved for me code, complete other heads-down analysis work, and tend to business needs; and on Friday, all readers get a visual look at topical news or discourse, called Chart of the Week.
Other than pressing news analysis, I try to send all newsletters in the morning — usually by 9:00 a.m. Eastern. The paywalled subscriber-only Takes get posted at random hours, whenever I’m ready with them. Until I figure out a better solution, podcasts and live chats will be conducted ad-hoc and promoted in advance on social media so you don’t miss the action.
Price and pay transparency
To start, I’ve set the price of a Strength In Numbers subscription at $9/month USD, or $7.50 per month if you pre-pay for 12 months. I think this is a reasonable starting price, and it has done well in testing and comparison shopping. Generally, it is cheaper than competitor data-driven sites (some political intelligence websites are $350 a year!) while reflecting (1) the added value that my data science skills bring to political coverage, (2) the frequency and quality of content available here, and (3) the access subscribers get to a community of like-minded data/election nerds, including other Strength In Numbers employees.
You can also choose to pay more and become a “founding member” of the site, which gives me a strong runway for growing content strategy (and ingratiates me to you personally). If SIN gets enough founding members (probably around 100), I should be able to pay freelance rates to members of the online elections analysis community to contribute their own analysis to the site. That would be a first step to fulfilling my ultimate aspiration for Strength In Numbers, which is to become a (monetized and profitable) replacement for all the political work we did at 538.
Apart from the founding members, I’m optimistic hoping to convert about 6% of the audience to paying subscribers, which Substack tells me is above average across all their newsletters. Because political writing is so seasonal, I expect this number will unfortunately be a little lower, closer to 4-5%. I invite you to prove me wrong!
Join a community for data-driven journalism
If you’re someone who cares about understanding politics and public opinion deeply and objectively — without the noise of traditional news coverage, the biases of punditry, and algorithmic pollution of social media — this community is for you. If you’d like to sign up for a free subscription, or already have and want to become a paid member, click this button:
If you are not interested in all the frills of a paid subscription, or you would simply like to make a one-time contribution directly to the Strength In Numbers business account, you can send a donation via Stripe using the button below. Donations are used to support operating costs, like salaries and servers:
And if none of these options are right for you financially, the best thing you can do is post about this publication and share this article with your friends and family!
About me/this blog
You probably know me from my work forecasting elections or aggregating polls for ABC News, FiveThirtyEight, and The Economist. In 2022, I authored Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them, a comprehensive exploration of public opinion polling and its vital role in democracy. The book delves into the history, methodology, and impact of polls, advocating for their continued relevance in capturing the public's voice. I also do a good amount of speaking to public and private clients, and there’s a good chance you’ve come across some of my slides on polling and forecasting too.
I plan to do similar stuff here; I’ve been putting together statistical models that cut through the noise of traditional news coverage for a decade, and consider this one of my primary comparative advantages.
However, I plan to do a lot more than just make predictions here. When I graduated from the Government, History, and Computer Science programs at the University of Texas at Austin, I was on the fence about studying American politics, methodology, and public opinion professionally via a PhD program. I am not an academic, but have held on to that approach to my work in other pursuits: I do not make predictions for prediction’s sake, but as one component of a bigger strategy to understand complex systems and bring key insights to a public audience.
Through my book, writing, and forecasting, the unifying thread of all my work so far is that data offer us (somewhat) objective tools to improve democracy and representation for the average person. That means monitoring public opinion about our leaders and parsing polls on the public’s priorities, but also understanding where that data comes from and extracting insights from it responsibly. It means writing about government data when it disappears, monitoring new academic scholarship about political behavior and the health of our republic, reporting on people in the real world and looking for data that identify pain points for people so leaders can direct resources to help them.
Since starting this blog in 2018, I have aimed to demystify the intricacies of polling, public opinion, and political science. This blog equips readers with the tools to critically assess data, recognize biases, and understand the nuanced realities that data reflect. By promoting data literacy, these pieces encourage a more informed and engaged citizenry capable of navigating the complexities of modern democracy.
Contributors
I am still figuring out exactly what form Strength In Numbers will take once it is fully grown, and one potentiality is that this becomes a collaborative effort with guest writers and cross-posting from other Substacks. Feel free to send pitches to me via email.
By “non-partisan“ I do not mean that I will not publish things that reflect poorly on one party, but rather, that the analysis does not start in an empirically unwarranted fashion from a partisan perspective, even if conclusions end up alienating one side of the aisle.
