Local Political Expert — Elections Forecasting & Political Risk

Posted 21 Sep 2026

$150–250/hr

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Work

Remote · Contract · 20 hrs/wk

Experience

8+ years

Eligibility

CAN, USA

Field

Humanities

Skills

Election ForecastingPolling AnalysisPolitical Risk AnalysisProbabilistic ForecastingCausal Event AnalysisMarket-Implied Odds AnalysisUS State and Local PoliticsPolitical Report WritingAI Model Evaluation

About this role

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.

Disclosure: Skillora is independent of Mercor. The apply button carries our referral code, and if you are placed, Mercor pays Skillora a fee. It does not change what you are paid, our ranking does not know which listings pay us, and selection is decided by Mercor’s own vetting.

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