Arnon Mishkin, the director of the Fox News decision desk, has been under fire since he made the fateful decision last week to declare the state of Arizona as won by Joe Biden. The call made by Fox News was widely credited with making the former Vice President appear to be the inevitable winner.
Mishkin is the Founder and Managing Director of Mishkin Associates consulting firm.
Fox News stuck to its decision even as news networks like CNN, which President Trump likes to call fake news and his supporters accuse of being left-wing, continued to list Arizona as undecided.
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After the call was made Arnon Mishkin spoke on Fox News late on Election night. He defended his call saying, “’I’m sorry, the president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that seven-point lead [in Arizona at the time he spoke] that the former vice president has. I’m sorry, but we’re not wrong in this particular case.”
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Looking forward to going on fox in a minute to talk about our great team. pic.twitter.com/tt75iUYtFD
— Arnon Mishkin (@arnonmishkin) November 7, 2020
On Wednesday night Mr. Mishkin stated, “We’re confident that the data will basically look like the data we’ve noticed throughout the count in Arizona.”
“We are not pulling back that call,” Mishkin said. “There is vote, additional vote that will be reported in Maricopa County. We do not believe that this will change the tenor or the texture of the race, and we strongly believe that our call will stand. And that’s why we’re not pulling back the call.”
The Trump camp wasted no time in going after Mishkin. It sent an e mail to the press which asked, ‘Why would Mishkin put his finger on the scale for Joe Biden before so many votes are counted?”
The e mail went on to say, “Mishkin is a registered Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, worked as a Democrat political consultant, and has a long record of donating to Democrats, including the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign.”
The Trump War Room Twitter account also tweeted out the above unsubstantiated claim.
In a press release the Trump 2020 campaign stated, “Arnon Mishkin, the director of Fox News’ election decision desk, prematurely called Arizona for Joe Biden before hundreds of thousands of ballots had been counted.”
“Even left-leaning election analysts like Nate Silver have criticized the decision, but Mishkin is standing by his terrible decision despite and refusing to retract his unjustified call.”
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But Fox News stuck to its guns in defense of Mishkin. On Thursday its most respected reporter Chris Wallace said of the Arizona call that it had, “caused a lot of heartburn in the Republican party but I did check in with our Decision Desk earlier today and they are not wavering. They say our call in Arizona was right, which puts them at 264.”
And in response to the attacks Mishkin himself said on air that he and his team, “basically check our politics at the door and focus our statistical or political analysis on the computer and what the numbers show.”
“Essentially, everyone on our team is very interested politically, and so they all vote. I don’t ask them specifically how they vote. I do know that many of them have professional experience that’s Republican, others of them have professional experience that’s Democratic.”
From his official bio:
Over a twenty year consulting career, Arnon Mishkin has advised media companies on issues of strategy and marketing. Formerly a partner of The Boston Consulting Group and Mitchell Madison Group, he currently leads Mishkin Associates, advising clients on issues of core strategy, marketing and targeting.
Most recently, Mishkin has worked with the Newspaper Association of America to assess the use of newspaper content by digital companies, identifying ways for publishers to increase the monetization of their content and also to protect their intellectual property.
At the strategy level, Mishkin facilitated the board of the AP in approving and “fast-tracking” an industry-wide approach to mobile, “AP Mobile.” The board agreement on AP Mobile, the first product of the AP Digital Cooperative, enabled the AP to launch the product within three months. It remains the only mobile news product with in-depth local news information, and was named by Business Insider as one of the top 100 apps for the iPhone.
He has worked with several media companies to identify ways to leverage social media – Facebook, Twitter and others – to increase customer involvement and create value for the media company.
