My impression here is that the "explore submission" link should probably be removed because that prompts the user to navigate to that link and in doing so removes the "pop-up" bubble.

Instead, clicking on the data-point as is right now take you to the page. I think a reasonable solution here would be to simply remove the "explore submission" link to encourage the user to click on the bubble and not any linked text that makes the pop-up disappear. Does that seem reasonable to you?