If you happen to be following us on Twitter, you probably already know the big news: we’ve agreed on an exclusive partnership with The Argument. While Split Ticket and its website will still continue to exist as normal, we will be publishing the bulk of our analysis there for the foreseeable future. As part of the deal, Split Ticket co-founder Lakshya Jain will also be the new Director of Political Data at The Argument (though he will still remain a partner at Split Ticket).
At The Argument, we will be doing a lot of custom, in-house polling. The goal is to create a public opinion vertical that can provide quality, unbiased data in the vein of The Upshot, which revolves around a lot of polling done by The New York Times/Siena College. While we plan to test things like Trump’s approval and the generic congressional ballot in each survey, much of the focus will be centered around understanding how Americans think — and that will entail doing a lot of issue polling.
To protect ourselves from unconscious bias creeping in, we’ve committed to having a bipartisan group of experts and survey practitioners review our survey design before fielding. Our goal is to shine a light on how Americans feel about a variety of topics, like free speech, artificial intelligence, economics, and foreign policy. This helps us understand how they see the world, and in the process, we can more deeply understand political allegiances and alignments.
This also means that we have ended our partnership with the Washington Post. It was an honor to write there, but we believe this partnership with The Argument gives us much more potential to bring you cutting-edge analysis, with a wealth of survey microdata that we never had access to before. Want to know how non-white voters who voted for Trump are feeling about his administration now? Curious about how young nonvoters from 2024 are saying about Trump’s performance in office, and what they say about AI usage in society? We’ve got the survey data for you, and can aggregate it in a flash. Our first survey is set to come out next week for subscribers — please consider subscribing if you haven’t already!
Four years ago, Split Ticket was created when a group of friends got together to start a website for election analysis. The goal was just to have a place for us to write about elections in formats that exceeded a 280 character limit, and we could never have anticipated growing in the way we did. Thank you to everyone who’s been with us and supported us, and we hope you’ll join us for the ride at The Argument too.
I’m a computer scientist who has an interest in machine learning, politics, and electoral data. I’m a cofounder and partner at Split Ticket and make many kinds of election models. I graduated from UC Berkeley and work as a software & AI engineer. You can contact me at lakshya@splitticket.org