Associate, Elections Data & Analytics

About the Role

The Cook Political Report is seeking an Associate, Election Data & Analytics to join our editorial team. This role sits at the intersection of data and journalism — maintaining and analyzing the candidate, race, and election data that underpins our nonpartisan ratings and analysis, and turning that data into clear visualizations for our readers. In addition to a keen eye for data, this role requires someone with excellent writing and communication skills. This position reports to the Managing Editor, Carrie Dann, offering a unique opportunity at a trusted nonpartisan outlet for someone early in their career who seeks hands-on experience in political data, analytics, and visualization and mentoring by highly-respected experts in the field. 

Responsibilities

• Maintain and update candidate profiles, polling, and election data across House, Senate, Gubernatorial, and Presidential contests, exercising sound judgment when reconciling ambiguous or conflicting information;
• Build charts, maps, and interactive graphics in Datawrapper for our newsletter, website, and social media, including on tight turnarounds around election nights and primaries;
• Enter and QA new data as it becomes available (FEC filings, election results, candidate announcements), flagging discrepancies to editors as needed;
• Use R and spreadsheets to clean, organize, and analyze data to support editorial research and trend analysis;
• Write brief campaign summaries for race pages as requested;
• Collaborate with editors and analysts across our House, Senate, Governor, and Presidential teams to support their data & research needs;
• Maintain data integrity and consistency across our CMS (Drupal) and related spreadsheets/databases;
• Explore and pilot AI tools to improve data workflows, and stay current on emerging AI/data tools relevant to political data journalism;
• Provide support to Cook Political Report newsletter and content publishing as needed.