A number of you have written in to ask how the polls ended up doing in the 2026 midterms. I think we know that they underestimated Democratic strength. But how much? How consistently? What I’ve assembled below is just a provisional, back-of-the-envelope read. Others will do this more comprehensively, looking across all polls, comparing them with the final certified results and then adding additional fancy numbers stuff. But I wanted to come up with a provisional read.
I took 12 Senate races that by the widest measure appeared to be contested. I took the final poll average in each from Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin and I compared them to the current posted results on The New York Times results page. Votes are still being counted, but margins won’t change much. With the poll average and the final result I rounded to the closest whole number before comparing them to find the amount of error or miss.
Here’s what I came up with.
Polls underestimated Democratic strength in all 12 races. The (simple) average underestimation was 4.75 percentage points. The biggest differentials were 9 points each in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, and the smallest was one point in Kansas.
Ohio Poll Avg: D+3; Result: D+5 D+2
SC Poll Avg: R +1; Result: D+4 D+5
Georgia Poll Avg: D+ 9; Result: D+18 D+9
Iowa Poll Avg: D+1; Result: D+5 D+4
Kansas Poll Avg: D+4; Result: D+5 D+1
Maine Poll Avg: D+4; Result: D+6 D+2
Michigan Poll Avg: D+5; Result: D+8 D+3
NC Poll Avg: D+11; Result: D+20 D+9
Texas Poll Avg: D+3; Result: D+12 D+9
Florida Poll Avg: R+6; Result R+3 D+3
Minnesota Poll Avg: D+6; Result D+10 D+4
NH Poll Avg: D+8; Result D+14 D+6
We have no results yet from Alaska. In Mississippi there were no independent, non-partisan public polls for the whole cycle.
