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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.

I wanted to follow up on my post about Pat Ruffini’s deep dive about the accuracy of Senate race polling in recent cycles and whether they’ve overstated Democrats’ strength. But since I wrote that post, I’ve also gotten a few emails from friends and TPM readers about polling generally. So I wanted to combine all of this together into some general comments on polling and whether we should care about it at all.

In the wake of the big apparent polling misses in Michigan and Wisconsin, we’re seeing another wave of discussion about a purported “crisis” in polling and what we should collectively do about it or what the polling industry should do about it. Mostly, the answer is there is no “crisis” — at least in the sense of one that any of us should care about as some problem for American democracy or elections or anything else. If you’re in the polling business, it may well be a problem. But if you’re not, who cares? There might be a crisis in Swiss cheese marketing too. But if I’m not a cheese monger, why do I care?

One of my great meta-journalistic interests is to observe the moments when more or less obvious political realities enter D.C. conventional wisdom. They’re not strongly overlapping Venn diagrams. They often diverge pretty dramatically. I noticed one of those moments Saturday when Axios published this piece entitled “Term-limited Trump mortgages GOP’s future.” The headline mostly speaks for itself. President Trump won’t face voters again. So he’s increasingly indifferent to his political standing or perhaps more specifically unwilling to shift from or limit unpopular policies. It’s true that there are big consequences for Trump in the midterm elections. But even in the biggest blowout election Democrats aren’t going to gain supermajorities that would allow them to pass veto-proof legislation or remove Trump from office. Given the scale of High Court corruption, investigations will amount to trench warfare.