With the 2025 election in the rearview mirror, Decision Desk HQ wanted to take a look at polling. After all, public opinion surveys play an important role in trying to understand how Americans feel about politics and how they plan to vote in elections. DDHQ tracks many major topics with our own polling averages, such as presidential job approval. To plunge into the polls, DDHQ Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley spoke with two cofounders of FiftyPlusOne, a polling aggregation website built by a group of FiveThirtyEight alumni: Mary Radcliffe, FiftyPlusOne’s head of research, and G. Elliott Morris, head of analytics and author of the Strength in Numbers Substack.

We talked about FiftyPlusOne’s work and why polling is vital in a democratic society. We explored the challenges involved in polling aggregation, what happened with polling in 2025, and what pollsters need to watch out for in the future. The rich conversation even includes discussion of a poll that Mary and Elliott helped conduct ahead of the 2025 election and the curiously simple text message that improved their response rate among young voters.

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