I'm out on vacation this week, so the episode you're about to hear was recorded earlier.

It's a great episode, so stay tuned.

In the run up to any modern presidential election, assessing a candidate's successes and failures

have served as fodder for political pundits, for analysts, for campaign advisers.

And in part, those assessments of whose winning and which messages are working are drawn

from a whole sprawling effort designed to take the pulse of the American voter.

What effort is political polling?

These days, there are public polls, private polls, polling shops out of news organizations,

universities, research centers.

There's also internal polling specifically conducted for candidates with a stake in a given

race.

Each kind of poll serves a different purpose, an often a different audience, but they share

in common their efforts to learn more about how Americans make choices on what issues to

value, what causes to believe in, and which candidates to support.

Polling shows that President Trump has been watching polls closely as the November

election nears.

And at this point, things are not looking great for Trump, who trails Biden in most national

polls.

Trump's team has argued that many polls that show a Biden lead are skewed, that a silent

majority of voters will turn out for him in the fall, and that 2020 polling is just a

repeat of 2016 polling, which showed Hillary Clinton leading nationally.

Of course, as 2016 showed, polls aren't perfect, and the ways they are interpreted

...