Local Political Expert, Elections Forecasting & Political Risk

Mercor is building expert-authored forecasting and research data to evaluate and improve AI models on real political and financial analysis. Each task asks you to reason from a fixed evidence cutoff, without 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. Remote hourly contract, open to candidates in the United States and Canada.

What you will do:

• Author point-in-time political reports and forecasts from a stated evidence cutoff
• Make and document 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 they look for:

• Local political analysts with hands-on experience on specific swing-state races (Senate, governor or statewide)
• On-the-ground knowledge of the electorate and candidates (e.g. university political scientists, state pollsters, campaign or party analytics staff)
• A record of live judgments about polling, win probabilities or odds
• Strong polling literacy and causal event analysis
• Typically 8+ years of direct experience

Not a fit: mainly international or geopolitical profiles, analysts without recent US state race experience, pure communications or journalism profiles, or purely theoretical academics.