Episode 14: Pollapalooza, with Eli McKown-Dawson (Silver Bulletin) & Scott Tranter (DDHQ)

In this week’s podcast, we dug into polling, which is such a huge part of the conversation around elections. Beyond knowing who is in the lead and by how much, surveys can help us understand what issues are driving voters and what people think about the parties and their leaders. However, individual polls are subject to different forms of error that can affect their results. And pollsters can sometimes encounter challenges — think of 2016 and Donald Trump, white working class voters, and the Midwest — that can produce widespread, systematic error. So, the election community likes to track how well pollsters perform individually and as a whole.To explore this topic, we welcomed Silver Bulletin Senior Election Analyst Eli McKown-Dawson and DDHQ Director of Data Science Scott Tranter onto the podcast. We focused mainly on McKown-Dawson’s new analysis of how the polls performed in the 2025 elections and recent trends in polling error published on Silver Bulletin. We talked about what might have led to some sizable polling misses in New Jersey and Virginia, what goes into polling error and polling bias (the statistical form of bias), the choice by some pollsters to weight their samples by recalled vote, and what all this could mean for polling in the 2026 midterms.Subscribe now This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit decisiondeskhq.substack.com