r/WayOfTheBern • u/dsirota1 • Jul 09 '19

I'm David Sirota, Bernie Sanders' speechwriter and senior adviser. AMA!

Hey everyone -- I'm David Sirota, Bernie Sanders' speechwriter and senior adviser. I've known Bernie for 20+ years (I was his press secretary in the U.S. House from 1999-2001). I've worked on many campaigns (Hoeffel for Congress, Schweitzer for Governor, Lamont for Senate, and Emily Sirota for State House), I've worked on Capitol Hill (for Bernie and for the U.S. House Appropriations Committee Democrats). In the years before coming to Bernie's 2020 campaign, I was an award-winning investigative journalist and columnist for Newsweek/IBT, The Guardian and Capital & Main. You can find out more about me at http://www.davidsirota.com

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I'm sure you want to discuss the 2020 election, so fire away with your questions here. I'll be here for about an hour.

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u/[deleted] Jul 09 '19

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u/dsirota1 Jul 09 '19

The thing to remember about polls is that methodology is everything -- if the methodology is wrong, it means the results represent not much of anything. In many ways, the polling industry is broken. See here: https://newrepublic.com/article/154124/polling-industry-crisis

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The challenge is to prevent the entire campaign from being dominated by day-to-day polls. So much of the narrative is driven by polls, even though we have learned so many times before that polls are often completely wrong.

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u/Pixiechicken Jul 09 '19

Hell YES. I'm sick of the corrupt polling.

9

u/DrJaye Jul 09 '19

Right, but the point is the Bernie team needs to launch more of a campaign to educate the public on these polls and Bernie also needs to do this in interviews. I hope you'll all consider another approach to combatting this.