“A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work,” the paper’s public editor once pointed out in a blog post. There’s been another sort of change, too: It’s no secret that Silver’s relationship with the Times was seen as fraught. Leonhardt offered the following: “He comes embedded with a lot of the skeptical conservative values that a lot of people like me who’ve worked at the Times for a long time tend to have.” Also: “When we’re talking about stories, there’s never that moment where I have to say to him, ‘Do you care if this doesn’t run in the paper?’ He’s part of a change where people have realized one is not better than the other.” It’s been fun watching him rise,” Franklin Foer, T.N.R.’s editor at the time, said in a press release announcing Cohn’s departure. Cohn was among Leonhardt’s initial batch of Upshot hires in November 2013, along with Amanda Cox, one of the graphics editors Cohn works closely with. I think he’s been on a roll.”Īfter his 2012 debut, it wasn’t long before Cohn was recruited by The New Republic, where he wrote about subjects ranging from “The New Census Data That Should Terrify Republicans” to “The Mysterious Town That Voted For Ron Paul.” (He also had a very public spat with the North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling, later dubbed “The Nerd Fight of 2013” by The Guardian.)Īnother one of Cohn’s early fans was David Leonhardt, the Pulitzer-winning economics writer tapped to start The Upshot following a relatively brief stint as the Times’ Washington bureau chief.
“He stood out pretty quickly,” said Sullivan, who is a fan of Cohn’s Times work as well: “He does much more narrative as well as stats. Cohn’s popularity with politicos and Beltway types took off from there.
If you were to pinpoint his “discovery,” you might say it happened on Tuesday, March 13, the night of the 2012 Alabama and Mississippi primaries, when Andrew Sullivan’s election live-blog over at The Dish-part of The Daily Beast at the time-picked up one of Electionate’s posts. In January 2012, he started his own blog about politics and polling called Electionate. Stimson Center, a D.C.-based global security think tank where he researched defense budgets and terrorism in Pakistan. After graduating in 2010, Cohn got a job at the Henry L. A debate-team member and astronomy buff, he caught the election bug during the Bush-Kerry contest of 2004 and went on to study politics at Whitman College, a private liberal arts school clear across the state in Walla Walla. )Ĭohn grew up in Auburn, Wash., a working-class suburb about 30 minutes southeast of Seattle. If someone wants to know what the black share of the electorate was in Georgia in 2010, I can tell them that.” (28.3 percent, for the record, he said. 17 contribution proclaimed: “Why the Cuba Issue No Longer Cuts Against Democrats in Florida.”Ī typical day for the 26-year-old might involve merging five pre-midterm surveys and re-weighting them, as Cohn did over Thanksgiving, or burying his nose in the North Carolina voter district file to figure out exactly what percentage of the population is either white or over the age of 65, which is what Cohn was up to when I visited him recently in The Upshot’s little corner of the Times’ D.C. (“The polls overstate his vulnerability.”) He’s also your go-to for, say, a demotic explanation of why “Republicans do not necessarily need significant gains among Hispanic voters to win the presidency,” a story The Upshot ran on Nov. One of his earliest hits was a prescient exegesis last March of Mitch McConnell’s reelection prospects heading into the midterms. Since joining the Times late last year, Cohn, bearing the same bookish, bespectacled countenance as his predecessor and the same predilection for predictions, has amassed a devoted following through his coverage of demographics and polling.
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