Podcasts

The Pollster Who Saw the Democratic Wave Coming with G. Elliott Morris | Second Request

Nov 06, 2026

Democrats swept the House and Senate on Tuesday in what pollster G. Elliott Morris calls the biggest rebuke of an incumbent party since Watergate. Morris had warned for months that the polls might understate how well Democrats would do.

In this episode of Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh and reporter Paul McLeod sit down with Morris, a data journalist and pollster who writes the Substack Strength in Numbers. They dig into what the polls got right and wrong, why his own poll was among the most accurate of the cycle, which voters shaped the results and whether Tuesday was a rejection of the status quo.