Season 2, Episode 5: What Polls Miss — and What We Should Focus on Instead

We originally asked our guest today, Michael Podhorzer, to come on to talk about voter demographics. Mike was the longtime political director for the AFL-CIO. He’s now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and he writes a Substack called Weekend Reading. And Mike has been one of the pioneers in Democratic circles using data and analytics to inform campaign strategy.

After we invited him on, President Biden had his terrible debate performance and the entire presidential race took a sharp turn. So we’re going to start with the news, and then later we’ll get into some of his big pictures thoughts on horse race polls, education polarization (he has differing opinions from our last guests on this topic), and what he calls “the anti-maga coalition.”

Since news is moving fast right now, we recorded this conversation on Tuesday, July 9 at 2pm.