McCourt School of Public Policy

Chase Dobson, and me, Sarah Sverdlov.

The Fly is brought to you by the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service and is made possible by the McCourt School of Public Policy.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode and we'll fly with you soon.

She studies adversarial abuse online, ranging from state actors running influence operations, to spammers and scammers, to issues related to child safety.

In October 2024, she joined the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy as an associate research professor.

Prior to that, she was the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Renee, thank you so much for joining us.

Renee has spent more than a decade studying how influence works online and how our information is shaped and manipulated.

She's an associate research professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy.

She was tasked by the Senate Intelligence Committee to lead teams analyzing Russia's efforts to manipulate American social media and our 2016 election.

She's a contributor to The Atlantic, a contributing editor at Lawfare, and her most recent book is Invisible Rulers, the one Tom talked about.

Original theme music is composed by Ada Ang and Bella Carlucci, and we're led by our two co-directors, Austin Culpepper and me, Kenneth Jackson.

The Fly is brought to you by the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service and is made possible by the McCourt School of Public Policy.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.

We'll fly with you soon.

In this month's episode, HDSR editor-in-chief Shally Mang and I are taking a closer look at election polling, how polls are conducted, what they can tell us about voters, and the challenges facing modern survey research, all in preparation for the Harvard Political Analytics Conference twenty twenty-six, taking place October eighth and ninth in Washington, D.C. We're joined by two leading voices in the field, who will also be speaking at the conference.

Anthony Salvanto, PhD, is CBS News's director of elections and surveys, and really the voice of elections, and Michael A. Bailey, author of Polling at a Crossroads: Rethinking Modern Survey Research, and the Colonel William J. Walsh Professor of American Government in the Department of Government and McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

We talk about what goes on behind the numbers, the changing landscape of election polling, and what researchers and really the public should keep in mind when interpreting survey results.

So let's get into the numbers and what they really mean.

Original theme music is composed by Ada Ang and Bella Carlucci, and we're led by our two co-directors, Austin Culpepper and me, Kenneth Jackson.

The Fly is brought to you by the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service and is made possible by the McCourt School of Public Policy.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.

We'll fly with you soon.

That means that the Democratic Party needs to gain a net of only four seats in the Senate and three districts in the House to win majorities.

Back in 2022, during the last and also blisteringly contested midterm cycle, How Stuff Works spoke with Christopher Warshaw, now a political science professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

He said, "Campaigns hope that by buying a few extra thousand ads, they can put their candidates over the top and win control of the government for their party.

The American public is more polarized than ever before, but there's still this swath of independent voters in the middle who are trying to decide." And political ads, despite how annoying and even stressful they can be, have proven effective, especially in the tightest races.

Renee DiResta is a social media researcher and author who studies how propaganda, manipulation, and adversarial behavior spread online.

She's currently an associate research professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy after serving as a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, or SIO, as we'll refer to in the episode.

She has advised the White House and Congress on ways bad actors gain more information in the ecosystem.

Some of her best-known work came when the Senate Intelligence Committee asked her to lead outside teams investigating Russia's Internet Research Agency.

Awesome.

So Renee is an associate research professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and is also contributing editor at Lawfare, where she writes about tech, AI, and national security.

She was formerly research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, which is where she was last time we talked.

Actually, last time she joined the show, we talked at the Democracy Group.