Stats + Stories

With the 2020 U-S presidential election all but upon us, media are rife with prognostications about which way voters are going to swing. Will reliably red states stay red or will voters produce a blue wave that crashes across the country? Will economic uncertainty trump concerns over COVID 19? Is political polarization really as set-in-stone as some have suggested? Understanding voter behavior is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics with guest Andrew Gelman. Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award three times from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. His research interests include a wide range of topics, including: why it is rational to vote, why campaign polls are so variable when elections are so predictable and why redistricting is good for democracy among various others.

The federal government generates a lot of data, produced by agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. These data inform the decisions leaders make that shape our lives. Covering these agencies and their statistics is no easy task. A Bloomberg journalist was recognized this year for her excellence in reporting on these data, and that’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Molly Smith. Molly Smith is the team leader of U.S. legal news for Bloomberg. She’s just back from a three-month stint editing Japanese economic news. Before that, she covered the US economy for five years, including federal statistical agencies. It’s this coverage that the ASA recognized when it named her one of two winners of the 2026 Award for Excellence in Statistical Reporting. Smith was chosen “for championing credible, objective, accurate, and timely federal statistics and bringing attention to the threats to federal statistics.” Smith’s been working full-time at Bloomberg since 2016.

Jessica G. Myrick (@jessmyrick) is an associate professor of media studies at the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. Her research focuses on the role of emotions in shaping our responses to various types of media messagesMyrick's research has touched on topics ranging from skin cancer prevention campaigns and climate change appeals to the effects of incivility in responses to political Facebook posts and why we watch cat videos, and it has been featured in news outlets around the globe.

There's a lot of concern about how bots and algorithms shape our experiences, both online and off. Increasingly, those concerns are focused on our politics. Can bots fuel political polarization? Can algorithms shape political narratives? A recent study seeks to understand the agenda-building capabilities of social bots in a political context, and that is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with Phillip Arceneaux and Josh Anderson. Phillip Arceneaux is an assistant professor of strategic communication in Miami University’s Department of Media, Journalism & Film, where he specializes in political communication, public diplomacy, and public relations. Arceneaux also leads the Diplomacy Lab at Miami University and has consulted on public relations and marketing for organizations such as the Department of State, Naval Academy, and Central Intelligence Agency. Josh Anderson is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona, where his work focuses on studying science communication from an ecological perspective. Anderson’s research is situated within agenda-building and social identity scholarship. He’s a mixed-methods researcher who uses survey and experimental methods, interview-based qualitative methods, and computational methods to answer his research questions. Phil and Josh are two of the authors on a paper out with the Journal of Public Relations Research that focuses on the role social bots played in shaping campaign communication during the 2022 Ohio midterms.

During the 2010s, the United States netted just under one million new immigrants each year; between 2022 and 2024, that number was closer to three million. But since the election of Donald Trump, immigration to the U.S. has taken a nosedive, and potentially so has the economic growth of the country. The economic impact of the rise and fall of immigration to the U.S. is a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with Tara Watson. Tara Watson is the Director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution, where she’s also the John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair of Economic Studies. She is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Watson’s an economist whose work focuses on U.S. social policy, with interests in the safety net, health, and immigration. In 2015, she served as deputy assistant secretary for microeconomic analysis in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Economic Policy. In 2021, she published the book ”The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear,” co-authored with journalist Kalee Thompson. Earlier this year, Watson published a report with Brookings on the economic impact of immigrants on the U.S. economy.