Decision Desk HQ Podcast

A big part of the 2026 midterms is the race for the U.S. Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 majority. Because Vice President JD Vance can break a 50-50 tie in the GOP’s favor, Democrats must gain four seats for party control to shift. Of the races that could decide control, many will turn on the performances of high-profile women candidates. Those contests include Alaska, where Democrats’ chan...

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 some...

This week, the Decision Desk HQ podcast examined the messy state of affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives. There, Republicans hold just a 218-213 majority (with four vacancies), an edge so thin that GOP absences have at times left Democrats with more voting members on the House floor than Republicans. These trying governing circumstances have only made life more difficult for Speaker Mike J...

Welcome to the official midterm year of 2026! Looking ahead to what could happen this November, the podcast zoomed in on the electoral situations in Minnesota and Virginia. To do this, Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley was joined by J. Miles Coleman, the Associate Editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball , a nonpartisan political newsletter produced by the University of Virginia Center for Politics....

Happy New Year! With electoral politics briefly paused for the holiday season, Decision Desk HQ decided to do something a little different for this podcast episode. Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley took a spin in the time machine, going back more than 100 years to look at the electoral career of Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman ever elected to Congress . Rankin initially made h...

It’s been a busy couple of months since we began the DDHQ Podcast. But heading into the holiday period, we decided to focus our last regular podcast of 2025 on the 36 gubernatorial contests that will be on the ballot in 2026! To explore this rich topic, DDHQ Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley was joined by Jessica Taylor from The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter . Jessica is the Senate...

Everything is bigger in Texas, including the candidate filing deadline for the state’s 2026 primaries. To help unravel what happened around Texas’s Dec. 8 filing date and what to look ahead to in 2026, Decision Desk HQ Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley was joined by Gabby Birenbaum , the Washington Correspondent for The Texas Tribune. We dug into many of Texas’s key primaries that will take...

On Tuesday, the special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District drew the attention of election watchers everywhere. Naturally, then, the race in the Volunteer State vacuumed up our attention for this week’s podcast! Republican Matt Van Epps defeated Democrat Aftyn Behn by 9 percentage points, 54%-45%, to keep the 7th District in Republican hands. However, that still represented a 13-poi...

One of the leading stories this year has been mid-decade redistricting ahead of the 2026 midterms. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump began encouraging Republican-run states to create more favorable congressional maps for the GOP, starting with Texas . Democrats have responded with their own redistricting moves, including a redraw in California via the voter-approved Proposition 50. This we...

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 Ana...

The 2025 election is in the books! Decision Desk HQ had all the results and a livestream to cover the vote as it came in. But now it’s time to start making sense of what happened and what it could mean moving forward. To do that, DDHQ Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley welcomed two of his DDHQ colleagues, Director of Data Science Michael Pruser and Data Scientist Zachary Donnini, to discuss...

Besides the statewide contests in New Jersey and Virginia, there is another very high-profile office on the ballot next week: New York City mayor! To talk about this contest, DDHQ Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley welcomed Michael Lange onto the podcast. Lange is a writer, researcher, strategist, political organizer, and expert on New York City politics. He writes about NYC on his Substack,...

Don’t look now, but New Jersey may have the closest race for governor on the ballot anywhere this November. To dig into this race, Steve Kornacki was kind enough to lend the Decision Desk HQ Podcast his Garden State expertise. Kornacki is NBC News’s Chief Data Analyst and a national political correspondent, but he actually got his start in political journalism covering New Jersey! We examined wher...

Virginia’s attorney general’s election has been at the center of political coverage in recent days after it came to light that Democratic nominee Jay Jones sent a series of violence-laden texts in 2022. To dig into the Virginia situation, DDHQ Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley was joined by Kyle Kondik , Managing Editor of the Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter at the University of Virginia C...

For our first episode of the new Decision Desk HQ Podcast, DDHQ Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley and DDHQ founder Brandon Finnigan took a look at the 2026 Senate elections. This episode serves as an excellent primer for understanding the lay of the land in the Senate and why Republicans currently appear to have the upper hand in the race to control Congress’s upper chamber. This is a publi...

NewsNation anchor and national correspondent Leland Vittert joined Geoffrey Skelley (Decision Desk HQ) and Chris Cillizza ( author of the “So What” Substack ) for a conversation about Vittert’s new book, Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, A Grateful Son, And My Journey with Autism . The book recounts Vittert’s life growing up, how he made his way as a journalist, and his father’s pivotal role in help...

Chris Cillizza, who runs So What on Substack, was kind enough to invite DDHQ Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley on for a Substack Live conversation. They covered redistricting, the House and Senate pictures ahead of the 2026 midterms, and presidential approval, among other things. This was the first of what will surely be many conversations now that DDHQ is on Substack! This is a public epis...

Dear reader, Welcome to the Decision Desk HQ Substack , home to The Bellwether , our weekly newsletter devoted to the ins and outs of electoral politics. DDHQ readers will receive leading analysis of elections and expanded content offerings, so please subscribe! You can also click here to find out more about Decision Desk HQ’s work as a leading election results provider. Thank you for reading, and...