Survey Statistics: it is (still) the people

A year and a day ago, the Survey Statistics blog series launched with: “it is the people that make make survey statistics (and anything) great”. This past weekend, we got to celebrate wonderful people at Andrew Gelman’s 60-ish Birthday workshop. Artist Sophie Gelman made the below: Yair Ghitza gave a talk about Andrew’s influence on polling. Yair is Chief Scientist at Catalist and coauthor of excellent papers about MRP we’ve cited in this blog series: Ghitza and Gelman 2013 and Ghitza and Gelman 2020. The discussion after his talk included mention of Nate Cohn’s May 18, 2026 NYT article about weighting with “synthetic past vote”. Let’s use our notation from “is a mismeasured X better than none at all ?” and “more adventures in mismeasured X” (see also “more on recalled vote”): Y = current support X = true 2024 vote, unknown X* = recalled 2024 vote And notation from “weights and MRP for voters”: V = current registered voter V2024 = record of voting in 2024 (a coarsened version of X…