How Reliable Are Voter Polls and Exit-like Surveys?

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The news cycle is quickly moving beyond last week’s elections. There’s the end of the shutdown, the Jeffrey Epstein emails, new candidates jumping into the 2026 primaries, and the release of Robyn’s first single in seven years (that one is for the gays). Pretty soon much of our electoral attention will be focused on the midterms.

Before we say goodbye to the 2025 elections, I wanted to do a post-mortem with the advantage of more data and less sleep deprivation. So, today we are focusing on some of the fundamental questions of the election, in particular: who, where, and why. The demographic and geographic breakdown of the vote and the issues driving voters.

We compare what we saw in 2025 to past elections, discuss what is means for 2026, and answer listener questions about the results. At the end we also get to some of the other things going on in the world, namely those Jeffrey Epstein emails and the raging battle over what kind of candidates the parties should be running if they want to win at the midterms.

With me for our 2025 election post-mortem is Lakshya Jain, head of political data at The Argument, Linley Sanders, polls and surveys reporter at the Associated Press, and Lenny Bronner, data scientist at the Washington Post.