Mercornew this weekLocal Political Expert — Elections Forecasting & Political Risk
Good fit for: scientists, researchers, and PhD holders in STEM fields.
Listing verified on the platform’s official board. Last checked September 25, 2026.
About the work
We are building expert-authored forecasting and research data used to evaluate and improve AI models on real political and financial analysis. Each task asks a practitioner to reason from a fixed evidence cutoff — no hindsight — and document the judgment a strong analyst would have made at that moment.
This role covers political report authorship: elections, polling, and political-risk events.
What you will do
- Author point-in-time political reports and forecasts from a stated evidence cutoff
- Make and document directional judgments about polling, win probabilities, and market-implied odds
- Explain the causal mechanism behind an event's expected political and market impact
- Review model-generated analyses and grade them against your own standard
Who we are looking for
- Local political analysts with hands-on experience on specific races in swing states: current or upcoming Senate, governor, or statewide contests, or recent cycles in the same state
- On-the-ground knowledge of the electorate, the candidates, and the local political environment, from roles such as university political scientist, state or regional pollster, state-level campaign or party analytics staff, or state political-risk analyst
- A record of making live judgments about polling, win probabilities, or odds in those races — not retrospective commentary
- Strong polling literacy and causal event analysis
- Typically 8+ years of direct experience, or unusually strong evidence of equivalent performance
Backgrounds we look at first: political science departments and survey research centers at universities in the target states, state and regional pollsters, state-level campaign and party analytics teams, and decision desks or race-ratings outlets with state-specific coverage. National forecasting or political-risk experience is welcome when paired with deep knowledge of a specific state. Brand-name experience is a strong first-pass signal but is not a hard requirement — direct experience and performance on the work sample determine who qualifies.
Not a fit
- Profiles whose experience is mainly international politics, geopolitics, or country risk, with little or no work on US races
- Analysts who have not worked on a current or recent US race in the state they would cover
- Pure communications or journalism profiles without demonstrated forecasting, polling, or probabilistic judgment
- Academic profiles whose work is purely theoretical, with no analysis of live races
Point-in-time discipline
Every task is graded on reasoning from the stated cutoff without hindsight, data leakage, confidential information, or material non-public information.