UPCOMING SPEAKERS & PRESENTATIONS

"I love people and asking questions," says Galen Druke. He will be answering some of the questions we all have about the upcoming election on Friday, Oct. 18 in the Betsy Kennedy Community Room at the Cazenovia Public Library. His talk, "Making Sense of the 2024 Election," will be presented by the Cazenovia Forum at 7 p.m.

Druke, who attended Cazenovia High School, is the host of the "FiveThirtyEight Politics" podcast, which aims to explain politics through an engaging blend of statistics and traditional reporting. He has appeared on ABC News, BBC, NPR, C-Span, CBC, WNYC, Sky News, Deutsche Welle and more.

An expert on American democracy and electoral politics, Druke's first full-time job after graduating from Johns Hopkins University was at Wisconsin Public Radio where he was one of the creators of a popular daily newsmagazine.

In his public presentations, Druke analyzes polling data and synthesizes complex information into a coherent narrative, providing context and perspective on the current issues. "Key to representing the content for audio is to try to avoid listing numbers and try to tell a story around the numbers that you are talking about," he said in a 2018 interview with Northeastern University's School of Journalism. "Hopefully we've helped people learn about how probability, elections and uncertainty work over time."

In that interview, he noted that polls do not predict outcomes with certainty, but instead provide an estimate. Although pollsters in 2016 were accused of getting it wrong, Druke points out that Donald Trump was given a 30% chance of winning and that "things with a 30 percent chance of happening are going to happen all the time."

"It's important to think about the ways that we confront uncertainty in our own daily lives," he said. "Part of living is understanding that not always the most expected outcome happens. That's something we try to help people understand on the podcast – that just because the most expected outcomes won't always happen, it doesn't mean you should reject the method altogether."

The presentation is free, but seating is limited so we ask that you RSVP in advance. By going to  www.tinyurl.com/galendruke you can reserve a free ticket. A reception will immediately follow the presentation.

The Cazenovia Forum hosts a regularly scheduled public affairs lecture series that offers citizens from Cazenovia and surrounding areas an opportunity to hear nationally and internationally known experts on a variety of key issues and to engage in thoughtful discussion.