No Margin For Error

In just eight years, Mileah Kromer has built the Goucher Poll into an institution.

- Ron Cassie

Mileah Kromer had thought of everything. Or so she thought. She had sharpened her political polling and branding skills under Elon University professor Hunter Bacot, who’d developed a national reputation for excellence as the director of the North Carolina school’s renowned polling operation. Hired by Goucher College to direct the Sarah T. Hughes Field Politics Center and launch Goucher’s own Maryland polling operation in 2012, Kromer had done an enormous amount of work to get the school’s first-ever poll out a week before the elections that fall. Beyond the careful formulation of questions and statistical modeling, she built a phone center on campus from scratch and hired and trained students to make calls, all while maintaining a full-time teaching schedule. The stakes were high, too. Included in that inaugural poll were questions about same-sex marriage and the expansion of casino gambling, which were both on the ballot. Also in that first Goucher Poll were a host of questions about how Marylanders felt about undocumented immigrants. Should they be able to pay in-state tuition? Should they be allowed to keep their jobs and pursue a path toward U.S. citizenship? So, too, were favorability queries about President Barack Obama, challenger Mitt Romney, and Governor Martin O’Malley.

Kromer spent days tabulating the results and quadruple-checking the numbers, and then crafted a press release. She took a deep breath, and a week before the election, hit “send” to a long list of local news organizations and media contacts on Monday morning as planned. But there was one thing she hadn’t considered: Superstorm Sandy hit Baltimore that same morning. Sort of. The city basically escaped unscathed. Not that you would’ve known it from television coverage.