With less than three weeks to Election Day, Republicans have found a comfort blanket: the polls might be wrong. Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by roughly 9 points, up from about 6.5 around Labor Day, and that is slightly wider than their margin at this point in 2018, the year of the blue wave and a 41-seat House gain.
The numbers that hurt
A new Fox News poll found Democrats well ahead on which party would better handle foreign policy, gas prices and inflation. Brit Hume, Fox’s chief political analyst, said on “Special Report With Bret Baier” that Republicans are “way underwater by any number of points” on all three. He pointed back to 1994 as the kind of washout the GOP should fear, one where “they lose a lot that weren’t even thought to be close.”
Trump’s own standing worries him more. Hume put the president’s approval at 36%, which he said means Trump might turn out 36% of the electorate while 64% disapprove. Silver Bulletin’s average is kinder but not by much: 38% approve and 60% disapprove. On the cost of living, 71% disapprove.
The polling-error bet
In conversations with more than a dozen GOP operatives, pollsters, strategists and party officials, most conceded the national environment is bad and has worsened in recent months. Yet many hold out hope for a repeat of 2022, when polls projected a Democratic romp that never came. They also note that Trump beat the final polling averages in all seven swing states in 2024.
The technical argument, as ever, rests on who answers the phone. GOP strategist Matt Whitlock said polling “still has not figured out how to model Republican voters who either don’t answer the phone or just aren’t really interested in polling.” Under the hood, that is nonresponse bias: pollsters reweight samples, but the adjustments rest on assumptions about an electorate that keeps shifting.
Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights offered the best evidence. In Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, 93 percent of Senate polls overestimated the Democratic candidate, and polls a month out were off by more than 6 points on average in both midterm and presidential years. “We can get the environment right, but the map wrong,” he said. House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News the polling is wrong because Republicans do not want to respond.
The counter-case is thinner but real. Nate Silver’s data show polls underestimated Republicans by an average of 3.8 points in the three elections where Trump was on the ballot. In midterms since 2016 they have overestimated Republican support by an average of 0.2 percentage points. Midterm electorates also skew toward engaged voters who are likelier to answer pollsters.
Money moves
Whatever the public line, the spending says otherwise. This week top Republican super PACs aligned with Trump and congressional leadership pulled money from a handful of House members seeking reelection. Senior House Republicans have privately concluded the chamber is all but gone, and leaders are shifting resources to save the Senate, where seats in Texas, Alaska, Iowa and Kansas are in play.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said that “underestimating” Trump and his administration has “proven the experts and pollsters wrong every single time.” RNC press secretary Natalie Baldassarre blamed “bed-wetting strategists who aren’t in the game.” One GOP strategist working battleground races put it more bluntly: Republicans’ only hope in 2026 is that what happened to Democrats in 2022 happens to them. If the polling is right, he said, this could be one of the worst cycles in history for the party.
Sources
- Fox News Star Raises A Brutal Possibility For Republicans In Midterms
- The GOP's midterm lifeline: Maybe the polls are wrong
- The 2026 midterms polls are predicting a blue wave. Can they be trusted?
