The Economist’s US editor on how we’re covering this year’s race for the White House
I am fascinated by American political history and have been doing a bit of digging into our archives in the run-up to launching a new podcast. The Economist’s first lead story on a US election appeared on Saturday November 30th 1844. The newspaper expressed “agreeable surprise” at the victory of “the free trade American president” James Polk. The 2020 presidential election will be our 45th, but this will be the first one with its own dedicated podcast, “Checks and Balance”, which we launched on January 24th.
A presidential election is a long and transparent process to choose the world’s most…
Advanced call-blocking will make Americans harder to survey
American mobile-phone users are inundated with spam callers. Hiya, a Seattle-based call-monitoring service, estimates that consumers received 26.3bn robocalls in 2018, up 46% from 18bn the previous year. Phone manufacturers have taken note of their customers’ woes. In its latest software release, Apple has made it possible for iPhone users to send all unknown callers to voicemail automatically. Although the feature will no doubt prove useful to the millions of customers whose peaceful suppers are ruined by fake calls, it could be disastrous for the faltering public-polling industry.
The challenges telephone pollsters face have been growing. Polling by phone has…
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