W&L Alumna Named AP's Director of Polling
Polls made plenty of news during the just-concluded presidential election. Jennifer Agiesta, a 2000 graduate of Washington and Lee, knows the subject inside and out—she’s the new director of polling for the Associated Press.
Jenn, who has worked at AP since 2010, was previously the deputy director of polling there. In her new post, she will set strategy and provide guidance on the subject for the entire organization.
The Washington bureau chief of AP, Sally Buzbee, referred to Jenn’s “strong polling expertise and journalistic expertise” and lauded her as “a fluid and graceful writer.”
Jenn has worked as a polling analyst at the Washington Post and its Behind the Numbers blog, and has managed exit polling for Edison Research and Voter News Service. She has also researched communications strategies for private companies.
Just a few weeks ago, Oct. 26, Jenn did a telephone interview on C-Span’s “Washington Journal” about the gender gap in the presidential race. You can listen to her here. And in the day before the election she wrote an AP story about the way that polls became political tools in the campaign, and then her polling was the basis for AP’s comprehensive look at the changing U.S. electorate a week after the election. You can read that piece here. For more of Jenn’s work, she her writer’s page on Salon.
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