Can you trust a poll when no human ever picked up the phone? Eric sits down with Matthew Hanauer, co-founder of Civly, to unpack synthetic polling — building AI simulations of real, individually-modeled voters (using public voter file, demographic, and donation data) to predict how they'd respond to a survey. Matt walks through how Civly back-tests its models against real election results, why asking AI yes/no questions produces unrealistically extreme answers, why piling on more data (like social media) can actually make predictions worse, and how turnout modeling benefits from more than just "did they vote last time." Eric an...