Hasta La Gadget!

Middlebrow is a recap of the week in entertainment, celebrity and television news that provides a comprehensive look at the state of pop culture. From the rock bottom to highfalutin, Middlebrow is your accessible guidebook to the world of entertainment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has been surrounded by such heightened fandom that even the film’s 88-second trailer was an event, with fans seeing it in theaters on Black Friday. No argument need be made for the indelibility of “Star Wars” in pop culture. There is a small library of books on the impossibility of avoiding “Star Wars” and how fandom has affected us. Just as impressive as the intensity or longevity of its impact is the fact that it has managed to survive retroactive CGI alterations and the intergalactic skid mark that is Jar Jar Binks. In this age of engaging with culture almost entirely through routine obsession or excessive nostalgia, “Star Wars” makes for an interesting duality of the two presiding phenomena of fandom. So, what does that hyper-intersection say about the way we consume cultural objects?

“The Force Awakens” is the perfect example of big studio regurgitation that preys upon nostalgia. It’s a film built to metastasize overseas, like the sequels, prequels and remakes engineered before it (seemingly in a lab), and yet it maintains a certain value rooted in long-standing cultural relevance. “Star Wars” is our heightened longing for the past on futuristic space steroids. It is massively popular while enjoying the pull of community more commonly associated with niche interests. Really everybody — except maybe some cranky Trekkies — likes “Star Wars,” but you can like it and feel special through excessive knowledge of trivia, creative interaction with the myth or maybe particularly strong feelings about the loss of Jabba as a practical effect in the special edition of “A New Hope.”

Through this prism of seemingly immortal appreciation, “Star Wars” maintains the beautiful paradox that comes with proudly liking anything, old or new. Fandom endows the fan with both a sense of individuality and a sense of belonging. There is value in knowledge of something and social aspects to participating liking it. Except usually being a fan is all lovely hipster goodness only until the cultish curdles into macro-culture. Probably the most concentrated example of this is “Napoleon Dynamite.” Jared Hess’ student film gained cult recognition and then burst into popularity through its quotability, quickly breaching the realm of critical mass. As star Jon Heder said in an interview with HuffPost Entertainment, “It’s like a leak at a power plant. It exploded and everyone was contaminated.”

That threat of nauseating popularity looms much nearer for current obsessions. The loud, seemingly random voices of social media are actually a carefully-curated echo chamber for our interests. We “obsess” (as is the current parlance for enjoying a thing) and others obsess. The hall of mirrors that is Twitter turns the thing omnipresent and suddenly it becomes un-special to continue liking it. As Willa Paskin wrote in her fantastic article on obsession for Slate, “When part of the appeal of something is that, suddenly, it feels as though it’s all everyone you like is talking about, then it doesn’t feel so great when everyone you don’t like is talking about it, too.”

The two trends at play with “Star Wars” make for a frightening glimpse into what the future looks like if these fandom phenomena continue in tandem. The obsession with obsessions and repetition of nostalgia makes for an endless loop that rejects the new. Pop culture sends up bright shining stars that implode when they reach critical mass (and we move on to the next thing). All the while these peak nostalgic objects continue to burn bright, seemingly inoculated to even the most Jar-Jar-ian attempts at modern day ruination. It’s a cycle that forbids anything original to make a lasting mark on the pop culture canon. So, where does that leave us if these trends endure? We’ll all almost definitely have our own spaceships by the year 4014, but the downtime before takeoff will still be spent clicking through BuzzFeed posts with the microchips embedded in our brains, reliving all the things we started obsessing over pre-1999.

Follow Lauren Duca on Twitter: @laurenduca

Ah, mansplainers: Men who must explain “difficult” topics to women because, duh, we just don’t get them.

While the phenomenon is much older than its recently coined nickname, the moniker was formally introduced to America’s lexicon in Rebecca’s Solnit’s 2008 essay, “Men Explain Things to Me.” It was also hilariously catalogued by writer Sarah Jaffe in her Tumblr, “A Taxonomy of Mansplaining.” In August, Oxford Dictionary even validated the word by adding it to its online database.

SurveyMonkey shares previously unreleased 2014 polls that outperformed Pollster’s averages. Another poll shows bipartisan support for President Obama’s immigration policy, if not his executive action. And the latest investigation changed few minds on Benghazi. This is HuffPollster for Thursday, December 4, 2014.

SURVEYMONKEY’S 2014 ELECTION POLLS – A set of previously unreleased polls from SurveyMonkey shared exclusively with HuffPollster helps demonstrate the potential for their internet-based survey methodology.

A few days before the election, SurveyMonkey shared with HuffPollster a spreadsheet that included horse race results from surveys they conducted over the last two weeks before the election in 45 states, covering every contested race for Senate and governor in 2014.

Since the project was both experimental and relatively cursory in its modeling of the likely electorate, HuffPollster agreed to wait to publish the results until after the election. That said, we can verify that the analysis that follows derives from data shared with us in final form on the morning of November 4, before votes were counted.

Some background on the methodology: While telephone polls typically involve true random samples of working telephone numbers, the Internet allows no way to randomly select a sample of all email addresses or those who go online. Instead, most Internet research companies, including HuffPost’s polling partner YouGov, recruit large “panels” of respondents, usually via web advertising, who agree to participate in online surveys. Since the panels are not representative of larger populations, Internet researchers strive to reduce bias and make their data representative through the use of weighting, sample matching and other efforts to “model” a representative sample.

For this project, SurveyMonkey took a somewhat different approach. They did not draw participants from a pre-recruited panel. Instead, they solicited respondents from the millions of people that complete SurveyMonkey’s “do it yourself” surveys every day run by their customers for companies, schools and community organizations. At the very end of these customer surveys, they asked respondents if they could answer additional questions to “help us predict the 2014 elections.” That process yielded over 130,000 completed interviews across the 45 states with contested races for Senate or governor.

SurveyMonkey tabulated the results for all adult respondents in each state after weighting to match Census estimates for gender, age, education and race for adults — a relatively simple approach analogous to the way most pollsters weight random sample telephone polls. SurveyMonkey provided HuffPollster with results for each contest tabulated among all respondents as well as among subgroups of self-identified registered voters and among “likely voters — those who said they had either already voted or were absolutely certain or very likely to vote (full results are published here).

“We sliced the data by these traditional cuts so we could easily compare them with other surveys,” explains Jon Cohen, SurveyMonkey’s vice president of research, “but there’s growing evidence that we shouldn’t necessarily use voters’ own assessments of whether or not they’ll vote.” In future elections, Cohen adds, they plan “to dig in and build more sophisticated models that leverage the particular attributes of the data we collect.” (In a blog post published separately on Thursday, Cohen adds more detail about how the surveys were conducted).

The results are relatively straightforward. The full SurveyMonkey samples did very well in forecasting winners, showing the ultimate victor ahead in all 36 Senate races and missing in just three contests for Governor (Connecticut, Florida and Maryland).

The more impressive finding is the way the SurveyMonkey samples outperformed the estimates produced by HuffPost Pollster’s poll tracking model. Our models, which are essentially averages of public polls, were based on all available surveys and calibrated to corresponded to results from the non-partisan polls that had performed well in previous elections. SurveyMonkey’s full samples in each state showed virtually no bias, on average. By comparison, the Pollster models overstated the Democrats’ margins against Republican candidates by an average 4 percent. And while SurveyMonkey’s margins were off in individual contests, the spread of those errors was slightly smaller than the spread of those for the Pollster averages (as indicated by the total error, the average of the absolute values of the error on the Democrat vs Republican margins).

Not surprisingly, the cuts that narrowed their full samples to self-reported registered and likely voters made the SurveyMoney results more Republican and introduced some overstatement of Republican performance. Nonetheless, the average error for their results among these subgroups were still smaller than Pollster tracking models for both bias and total error. Given the solicitation used — an explicit pitch to help predict the elections — it’s likely that their initial participants were already “likely voters.” Interest in the survey topic has been shown to influence response, and validation studies find that voters are more likely than non-voters to participate in telephone surveys.

It is possible that the voters in this particular election, with an apparently lower turnout of key Democratic constituencies, closely matched a Republican leaning pool of respondents that completed SurveyMonkey customer surveys. “If you’re a polling firm who always shows Rs ahead,” as election forecaster Drew Linzer put it on Twitter in the context of automated phone polls, “an election where lots of Rs win doesn’t validate your methods.”

But that said, these results suggest that SurveyMonkey’s pool of respondents is diverse (or “heterogeneous”) enough that only relatively simple modeling was necessary, at least in this case, to remove their bias as compared to a true random sample of voters. While SurveyMonkey plans on “more sophisticated models” in the future, this characteristic means their efforts may not need to be quite as heroic as those applied to other data sources with more inherent bias.

“This was certainly exciting for me,” said Cohen, “given the last dozen years I’ve spent with high-end telephone surveys.” Cohen was formerly the polling director at the Washington Post and a vice president of research at the Pew Research Center. “The data on voter preferences were consistently different (read: more Republican) from what was publicly available, even as other measures — presidential approval and issues — were closely in sync with public numbers. Having tens of thousands of cases in important sub-groups also felt like an amazing luxury. There’s lots of work ahead, but this was a gratifying start to figuring out exactly what we can do with our data.”

REPORT CHANGES FEW MINDS ON BENGHAZI – Kathy Frankovic: “After a two-year investigation, the House Intelligence Committee has found no wrongdoing related to the 2012 attack on the U.S. Benghazi consulate that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador to Libya. The report has not convinced many, however, according to the latestEconomist/YouGov Poll. Perhaps part of the reason is that only 20% of the public say they have heard a lot about the report, which was released on a Friday a week before Thanksgiving….44% overall and three-quarters of Republicans do not believe the Administration did all it could to rescue those trapped in the Benghazi Consulate….There is yet another Congressional investigation of Benghazi yet to come: one by the GOP-led House Select Committee appointed in May. Many Americans see at least a little bit of politics in these continued investigations: less than one in four think they are solely serious attempts to find out what really happened.” [YouGov]

SUPPORT FOR OBAMA’S IMMIGRATION PLAN – PRRI: “More than 7-in-10 (72%) Americans favor allowing illegal immigrants who are the parents of children with legal status to stay in the U.S. for three years without being subject to deportation if they pass a background check and have lived in the country at least five years. Roughly 3-in-10 (27%) Americans oppose this policy. There is bipartisan and cross-religious support for the policy, although the strength of support varies substantially. More than 8-in-10 (82%) Democrats, 7-in-10 (70%) independents, and more than 6-in-10 (62%) Republicans support allowing illegal immigrants who have children with legal status to remain in the country for three years without being deported if they pass a background check and have lived in the country for five years….Americans are divided over whether Obama should have pursued executive action on immigration. Half (50%) of Americans say Obama should have taken action on immigration given that Congress has not acted on the issue, while 45% say he should not have taken action….In the wake of the high profile announcement about the executive action on immigration, President Obama’s job approval rating among Hispanics increased significantly. Currently, more than 6-in-10 (62%) Hispanics say they approve of the job Obama is doing as President—a marked uptick from October 2014 when fewer than half (46%) of Hispanics expressed approval.” [PRRI]

ERIC GARNER JURY MAY HAVE BEEN ESPECIALLY UNLIKELY TO INDICT – Harry Enten: “Staten Island residents are particularly sympathetic to the NYPD compared to New York’s other boroughs, and a majority of residents there think the officer should not have been charged. In an average of Quinnipiac University polls taken in August and November, only 41 percent of Staten Island residents supported bringing charges against Officer Daniel Pantaleo (the margin of error on these combined subsamples is 7 percentage points). In New York overall, 64 percent approved of criminal charges. Staten Island isn’t like the rest of the city….Had this trial been held in any other borough, the pool of potential grand jurors would have been less favorable to the NYPD.” [538]

HUFFPOLLSTER VIA EMAIL! – You can receive this daily update every weekday morning via email! Just click here, enter your email address, and and click “sign up.” That’s all there is to it (and you can unsubscribe anytime).

THURSDAY’S ‘OUTLIERS’ – Links to the best of news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data:

-Aaron Blake reviews a history of post election party ID polling bumps. [WashPost]

-Frank Newport considers the implications of opposition to the notion of the federal government ensuring that all Americans have healthcare coverage. [Gallup]

-Anna Greenberg (D) says Democrats should double down on “women’s issues.” [Politico]

-Latino Decisions (D) message-tests the impact of immigration on potential support for Hillary Clinton. [Latino Decisions]

-Microsoft makes its Bing Pulse audience polling service available to anyone. [TechCrunch via @OpinionToday]

-How Chicago health officials and (D) used data mining to refine outreach for breast cancer screening. [Kaiser Health News]

Peggy Maher is the Chief Marketing Officer of Barclaycard US. In this role, Peggy supports Barclaycard US’ growth ambitions by developing engaging marketing for new and existing customers, intuitive digital experiences, and customer-centric new products. Peggy is also the brand steward for Barclaycard US, overseeing all customer and corporate communications.

Prior to joining Barclaycard US, Peggy spent 25 years with American Express where she held various marketing and general management roles in the Consumer Card, Small Business, and Travelers Cheques businesses. During her tenure, she served as general manager of various consumer and small business portfolios, led product development, ran the rewards program, oversaw the rebranding, product, and digital launch for the Small Business segment, led acquisition and existing customer engagement marketing, developed digital capabilities, and initiated a new approach to customer advocacy across 22 countries.

Prior to American Express, Peggy held positions in finance at CBS and as a systems engineer at Professional Computer Resources.

Peggy received a master’s degree in business from the Wharton School with a concentration in finance and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.

How has your life experience made you the leader you are today?
I’ve made a point of putting myself in situations that place me outside of my comfort zone in order to expand my perspective and to stretch who I can be. For example, while in college I worked the graveyard shift as a waitress in the only restaurant in town that was 24/7. I once packed up all of my belongings that would fit into my car and drove 1,000 miles to a new location without knowing where I would live when I got there. My first professional job was as a systems engineer for a small company, something quite unconventional for women at the time. (It was 1982.)

Later in my career, I moved from a finance function to marketing despite warnings that I might be closing a door. At a senior leadership conference of 350 executives including the CEO, I performed a song that I wrote about competitive intelligence in order to push myself to move past stage fright. These stretch experiences have given me perspective and confidence as a leader to be up for any challenge.

How has your previous employment experience aided your tenure at Barclaycard?
The most important thing my previous experience has given me is leadership insight. Starting my career as part of a small business and also having spent many years in a large corporate environment has helped me understand how to adjust my leadership approach to fit the situation. Barclaycard US, the payments business of Barclays in the US, is on a steep growth trajectory — transforming the business from what was a startup just 14 years ago to a large organization. You may not know, we create customized, co-branded credit card programs for some of the country’s most successful travel, entertainment, retail, affinity and financial institutions like US Airways, NFL, Hawaiian Airlines, and LL Bean. We also offer Barclaycard branded programs such as Barclaycard Arrival, our award-winning travel rewards card.

Having insight into the cultural drivers of both small and large organizations has helped inspire a conversation with my colleagues on how to keep the passion, personality, and the pride of Barclaycard front and center as we grow. We may adjust our operating model to increase efficiency, but we will remain true to the roots of our culture.

What have the highlights and challenges been during your tenure at Barclaycard US?
Being part of Barclaycard’s high growth, high-energy environment has been a thrill. Barclaycard US has an uncanny knack for rallying the troops and simply getting the job done. Our focus on our customers – both those who carry our card as well as our co-brand partners, our can-do culture, and the desire to do it all while having fun makes Barclaycard a rare gem. We’ve grown 35% just in the past year, a growth rate that stands out in our industry. And I have the pleasure of working with a deeply experienced management team who really like working together; we have incredible chemistry. As we continue to grow, a key challenge will be to attract talent at all levels across the organization in a way that will preserve and nurture the same passion, energy, and enthusiasm that is the secret sauce of Barclaycard US today. Sourcing talent that is a fit with our values and our culture is imperative for our continued success.

What advice can you offer to women who want a career in marketing?
Marketing is part psychology, strategy, communications, technology, and financial savvy. My advice for women who want a career in marketing is to start by gaining experience in one (marketing) discipline, develop depth, demonstrate results, and then work to broaden across other disciplines to expand your perspective. Where you start the journey is not as important as committing to make the journey across the various disciplines. For example, in today’s digital world, a sound marketing strategy is dependent upon an understanding of digital capabilities and analytics.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned in your career to date?
Be open to the possibilities. When I started, I had a specific career path in mind, but things did not always unfold according to my master plan. I learned to embrace the unexpected. In fact, my best career opportunities came in two areas I could not have predicted ahead of time: new business growth and organizational transformation. I learned to spot opportunities where I would make a tangible difference in results, even if the position made my career trajectory look more like a winding path vs. a straight road.

How do you maintain a work/life balance?
Work/life balance is all about setting priorities and boundaries. It’s something that is very personal; no two people will approach it the same way. For example, when my children were little, I never wanted to miss a school concert or play, and I always wanted to be home for the children’s bath time. As a result, my husband and I chose to live near work so we could be involved in our children’s lives while still putting in a long day at work, investing in our careers. Work stopped when we walked in the door at home and we resisted the temptation of email until the children were in bed. My husband and I traded off travel schedules so that one of us was at home each night. Raising children in such an urban environment drew raised eyebrows from some, but it was right for us, and our children have had very rich childhood experiences.

Now that my children are in high school and college, my priorities are to be supportive and accessible. Being supportive can mean being at their sporting event, being there when they get their first college decision email, or traveling to college for parents’ weekend. Teens may not show outward enthusiasm for their parents’ attendance, but they know when we make them a priority. Planning for these events on my calendar is just as important as a partner meeting, and my team knows to protect these times. As for being accessible, technology advances have made this so much easier, no matter where I am. Any time of day or night my children can reach me – primarily by text, but also by Skype, FaceTime, or even an old-fashioned phone call. If one of them contacts me, they know I will step out of a meeting and listen.

What do you think is the biggest issue for women in the workplace?
Informal networking is underleveraged by women. For so many of us, it feels like “I should be doing something productive with this time.” We prioritize the work in our inbox or family time ahead of networking nine times out of 10. And that’s not always wrong, by the way! But I do think women undervalue the camaraderie that can be built by spending informal time, often after hours, out of the office at sporting or other events, with our colleagues and business partners. Getting to know each other as people develops better trusting relationships in the office.
One tip: Even when committed to networking, women often have to let their male counterparts know that they are “in.” Sometimes we are not top of mind when it comes to invitations to participate. Or better yet, invite them to a networking opportunity of your own making.

How has mentorship made a difference in your professional and personal life?
I credit a mentor with helping to give me the courage to go after a big job early in my career that changed my entire career trajectory. The job opportunity was in a different function, at a higher level and I was pregnant at the time. There were several reasons why I could have easily passed on the opportunity, but he had faith in me and pushed me forward. It was the best career advice anyone could have given to me – confidence in my own abilities.

I also credit my father as a pivotal mentor in my life. He was a proud, traditional man who had four headstrong daughters who often put him out of his comfort zone. During his lifetime, he witnessed dramatic changes in opportunities for women, and he responded by encouraging us each to be bold in our own way. He gave me a thought-provoking gift that I will never forget: a book entitled “How to Succeed in Business Without Being One of the Boys.” He knew decades ago that women could capitalize on their own unique contributions and that merely copying men was not necessarily the best strategy.

Which other female leaders do you admire and why?
I admire women who have confidence and their own brand of influence. The woman who comes to mind is Eleanor Roosevelt. One defining quote sums it all up for me: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” She was determined to create change, yet pragmatic and creative in her approach. For example, instead of demanding female reporters be allowed to cover the President, she created her own press conferences where only female reporters were allowed. Brilliant! She demonstrated how substantive change can be achieved without having to have a CEO title. Her work advanced the causes of civil rights, women’s rights, the poor and she had a significant role in the passing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’m in awe.

What do you want Barclaycard US to accomplish in the next year?
Barclaycard US has a unique opportunity to break with convention and demonstrate more than what you’d expect from a bank. Over the next year, I am very excited about our plans to continue our journey of customer advocacy, ranging from demystifying how consumers can best manage their own credit to showcasing how to get the most out of their credit card rewards program. Marketing today has shifted from an advertising model of telling you what a brand stands for to the creation of a customer experience that demonstrates the brand essence. Designing an engaging end-to-end customer experience that tells a story so compelling that our customers do our advertising for us – that’s my goal.