????Is it hard to keep your own political beliefs separate from your work predicting elections?

????It's always hard for us to be objective in any walk of life. None of us has a monopoly on reality, we all have rather jaded points of view. I do think the sports training helps though, where I can be a Detroit Tigers fan as I am [and was] growing up, I still thought Mike Trout [Los Angeles Angels] should have won the MVP award last year. What I think differentiates politics a bit is that you have an industry full of people who not only have views but are [also] used to manipulating public opinion. They're used to thinking they can create their own reality. That's why I think you have such trouble on the uptake there.

????People think that, well, if I can spin a fact a certain way or spin polls a certain way, [the problem] goes away. When you have a political press where some people are very good, but some other people are very compliant and happy to pass along spin from the campaigns, I think that's the issue. People aren't used to getting a reality check in politics as much as in sports.

????So how are you able to sift through that information then to pick out the BS?

????The idea is to ignore what the politicians say and stick with publically available data. The record shows that in general, most political observers tend to overrate the importance of a gaffe or a debate -- there are always exceptions -- but in general the polls provide a pretty reliable benchmark. And the public, who have real lives and are not constantly consuming political news, are [sometimes] weighing things in a very sophisticated way where they're looking at things like the economy or are we involved in any stupid wars or major scandals from the administration. Those are the things that explain a lot about who wins the elections and not so much the petty stuff that the political pundits can focus on.

????There is more data now than ever before. How are you able to determine which information to pull in order to properly answer your question?

????Part of it is that you do need -- as Vegas might say -- you do need a system instead of an ad hoc way of doing it. So we have a model that we designed in 2008 that was updated for 2012 that was designed to account for every single poll. Some polls, if they're from a pollster that has a better track record, get more weight in the system. It doesn't mean that others are ignored. So it's not like we're just looking at a poll and sticking our fingers up in the air and saying, "Oh that poll is important, and that poll's not." Basically all the hard work and all the decision-making process comes from designing this model before the fact. Based on theory and practice and past experience, what are a good set of rules for processing this information? And then sticking to that. We don't make any alterations to the model once we launch it in June every year, unless there's a bug, which fortunately there hasn't been. But the principles are always the same, and then you have a disciplined way to analyze data in that context.