Quotes About Analysis

I'm quite investigative. Believe it or not, my mum and dad were in the police, and I sort of like to read into things and stuff.

You want to keep intelligence separate from policy.

In baseball, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, but in political commentary, you need a metaphor.

I'm an economist, not a political scientist.

What is the role of an academic - no matter what they're teaching - within political debate? It has to be that they make issues more complicated. The role of the academic is to make everything less simple.

Political history is not the only way to approach historical figures.

Empirical evidence collected and analyzed by political scientists demonstrates that judicial pensions are the most important factor in a Justice's decision to retire, far more important than the party of the President or which political party has control of the Senate.

My job is to look at what politics is doing, not be a politician myself.

I cover media people the way they cover politicians.

Am I the only person covering politics who ever noticed that Newt Gingrich is actually a nincompoop?

I get asked a lot about getting into politics. I say, 'Take a look at politics. You tell me what seems appealing about that.'

Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.

Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it's not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.

I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.

I think polling methodology is broken.

I don't believe in traditional, head-to-head polling.

I know that a lot of people love to say that polls are wrong or don't matter, and from time to time they are - it depends on who they are polling.

National polls basically always misinterpret the final outcome or mis-predict the final outcome.

Exit polls have gone notoriously wrong in the past.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

If something doesn't work, you have to admit it. Always try to find what's going right and what's going wrong with your music. If you can, pool your resources and record yourself; do that frequently.

Our intelligence community was extremely poorly prepared before 9/11.

I don't think people saw me as a coach. But as a player I concentrated a lot on playing the game and I was always interested in the thinking side of football and speaking to managers about why they would pick a certain formation or play people in certain positions.

The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.