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This won’t come as huge news to most. But I’m getting asked about it a lot: can the polls be wrong? What do you think?
So let me put an answer here. They can obviously be wrong and you should be prepared for them to be wrong. If you’re running a campaign or SuperPAC, they can give you intel about where to deploy resources. If you’re just observing, they’re more about human nature and anxiety management. But whether you get excited or pushed into despair, we’ll know the actual results in about six weeks. Watch them or don’t. It’ll will be fine either way. There are no poll hubris gods. They can’t strike you down.
Let’s talk specifics.
The polls we’re seeing now are almost certainly directionally accurate. But they could be overshooting on their margins, which are quite large now. If they are we should expect to see that most in red states. (Even for someone like me who’s been bullish about this midterm cycle since mid-2025, some of these numbers are hard to believe.) States have partisan muscle memory that polls can miss. So for instance, yesterday Sabato’s Crystal Ball changed the Kansas Senate race from Likely Republican to Leans Republican, an astonishing development. The polls there are pretty close given that it’s Kansas, and the most recent, an Emerson poll, has Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton up by 1 point. But this is a classic case where you have to weigh a substantial amount of GOP muscle memory into the equation. Polls can miss that, or it can simply mean that undecideds break heavily for the state’s dominant party. To be clear, if I were a Kansas Democrat canvassing I’d be pretty pumped right now. A win is possible. But this is the cautious/realistic way to look at it. The same applies to the handful of other seemingly competitive races in deep red states.
In most of the red states where Democratic Senate candidates are ahead, they’re up by between 1 to 4 percentage points. Some late shifts and a medium-sized polling error could knock most or all of those into the GOP column. Another good cautious/pessimistic take comes if we look back at the big data dive GOP pollster Pat Ruffini did about a month ago. Ruffini’s a strong GOP partisan. But he’s a numbers guy, and you can trust his numbers as far as they go. He’s legit in that sense. The spin he might put on them is another matter. As we discussed at the time, Pat looked at the last four cycles: 2018 2024. He found that in the summers, polls had consistently overstated Dem strength relative to the outcome on Election Day. By Election Day in presidential years, the average over-estimation of Democratic strength had fallen to a small but still real margin. In midterm cycles (2018, 2022), it had disappeared almost entirely. (Needless to say, we’re in a midterm cycle.) In 2018 and 2022 on Election Day, they were pretty dead-on. This shift from summer to fall makes a certain sense because pollsters start shifting toward likely voter screens. Those get more accurate. And “likely voter” screens tend to favor Republicans versus “registered voter” ones, though there’s evidence to the contrary this year.
It’s important to note that four cycles don’t add up to an immutable law. Patterns hold until they don’t. But Ruffini’s message to a mostly Republican audience a month ago was: Don’t freak out. These numbers will likely start shifting in the GOP direction over September and October. If we assume Ruffini’s numbers are predictive (a debatable proposition), by Election Day polls should be very close to accurate. What’s driving the GOP freakout over the last week or so is that the opposite is happening. Democratic leads are expanding. That’s happening in Senate races, the generic ballot, state races like governorships.
A lot of people are still freaked out by the big polling misses in the primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin. As I noted at the time, there’s good evidence that Wisconsin was less a polling miss than a big move in Democrat David Crowley’s direction after the final polls. Pollsters tell us that this is apples and oranges. Primaries are way, way more difficult and unpredictable. My experience says they’re right about that. When I look at those numbers, it’s possible that pollsters were oversampling the most energetic Democratic partisans. It’s not impossible that something like that could be happening in the general election polls. But again, there are a lot more reasons to see these as just apples and oranges comparisons. Another key thing about understanding polling error is that relatively small polling errors can have big electoral effects. See the 2024 presidential election for instance. Don’t be surprised at all if the final result of an election ranges two or three points in either direction from the final poll average; half a dozen points is entirely possible.
If we’re looking for the most convincing evidence of Republican weakness, don’t look at the polls. Look at what Republicans themselves are telling us, mostly through their actions. The last two weeks have shown a raft of Republicans either scrubbing their websites of Trump’s name or in increasing numbers actually distancing themselves from Trump or even attacking him. (Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers is running an ad where he says prices won’t come down until the Iran War ends but since, welp, we can’t do anything about that let’s have a ban on diesel fuel exports!) In a normal political era, that’s not surprising in a midterm. Presidents let candidates do what they have to in a rough environment. Trump’s not like that. That kind of backing away from Trump is unheard of, especially in term two. Republicans are also pouring money and time into red states, and appear to be in the process of abandoning states like North Carolina.
That spending is a big indicator. Trump PACs are now spending in lots of districts he won in 2024 by substantial margins. But Republicans are also … well, spending a ton of money. In this final stretch, Republicans appear to have way, way more money than Democrats, and they’re spending it. My hunch is that even massive sums of spending don’t get you that far in this kind of environment. It’s probably most effective in House races where the incumbent was caught off guard and doesn’t have money to defend themselves. National spending can plug that hole, second that campaign budget. I think it’s of limited value in most races in this environment. But if you’re looking for something to doom out on, focus on that. But again, that’s not a polling issue.
The best way to look at the current environment is that Democrats are almost certain to have a strong election. The extent and intensity is what’s uncertain. We’re now seeing congressional generic ballot numbers breaking into the double digits. I’ve seen D+13 and D+14 numbers. If something like that actually happened, it would be a truly historic blowout. The tipping point for a big wave and taking the Senate is D+6 or D+7. SilverBulletin, FiftyPlusOne and Real Clear Politics all now show it at 8 or above. If you’re looking at states like Alaska, Texas, Iowa and Ohio where Dems are tied or up by a few points, there’s a ton of history and polling which says those are all likely to break for the Dems. But could they all break the other way? Absolutely.
Use your common sense. Polling is an inherently uncertain proposition. The Democrats are going to have a big election night. The extent of it is uncertain. Anything from a mere wave to historic tsunami is possible. Be prepared for either outcome. Basically all the signs are pointing in one direction. But you don’t know until you know.
