BigDataFr recommends: Politics and the New Machine

What the turn from polls to data science means for democracy. “I am who I am,” Donald J. Trump said in August, on the eve of this season’s first G.O.P. Presidential debate, and what he meant by that was this: “I don’t have a pollster.”

The word “pollster,” when it was coined, was meant as a slur, like “huckster.” That’s the way Trump uses it. Other candidates have pollsters: “They pay these guys two hundred thousand dollars a month to tell them, ‘Don’t say this, don’t say that.’ ” Trump has none: “No one tells me what to say.”

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By Jill LEPORE
Source: newyorker.com