Political Expert

About the role

Local Political Expert Elections Forecasting & Political Risk [$150-$250/hr] This role covers political report authorship: elections, polling, and political-risk events.

Responsibilities

• Author point-in-time political reports and forecasts from a stated evidence cutoff
• Make and document directional judgments about polling, win probabilities, and market-implied odds
• Explain the causal mechanism behind an event's expected political and market impact
• Review model-generated analyses and grade them against your own standard

Requirements

• Local political analysts with hands-on experience on specific races in swing states: current or upcoming Senate, governor, or statewide contests, or recent cycles in the same state
• On-the-ground knowledge of the electorate, the candidates, and the local political environment, from roles such as university political scientist, state or regional pollster, state-level campaign or party analytics staff, or state political-risk analyst
• A record of making live judgments about polling, win probabilities, or odds in those races—not retrospective commentary
• Strong polling literacy and causal event analysis
• Typically 8+ years of direct experience, or unusually strong evidence of equivalent performance
• Preferable backgrounds: Political Science departments and survey research centers at universities in the target states, state and regional pollsters, state-level campaign and party analytics teams, and decision desks or race-ratings outlets with state-specific coverage; national forecasting or political-risk experience is welcome when paired with deep knowledge of a specific state
• Not a fit: profiles whose experience is mainly international politics, geopolitics, or country risk, with little or no work on US races; analysts who have not worked on a current or recent US race in the state they would cover; pure communications or journalism profiles without demonstrated forecasting, polling, or probabilistic judgment; academic profiles whose work is purely theoretical, with no analysis of live races