Republicans nervous about the midterms are increasingly turning to the same salve: The polling will be wrong.
They aren’t suggesting Republicans will have a good night come Nov. 3 — or that the party will hold the House. But they’re clinging to the possibility that it could be a typically bad midterm year reminiscent of 2022, when polls projected Democrats would be pummeled, only for those predictions to fall short.
It’s happened in other cycles, too, they note. President Donald Trump outperformed final polling averages in all seven swing states in 2024 and defied the national polls in 2016 as well.
This story is based on conversations with more than a dozen people, including veteran GOP operatives, pollsters, strategists working on battleground races and national party officials. Most conceded the national environment is bad for Republicans and has only gotten worse over the last few months. But even a small sampling error, they say, could completely change how election night turns out for the GOP.
“Part of the challenge here is 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, and so I do think that the Senate map across the board, there’s more reason to doubt the polls than you would guess by seeing how both media and Democrats are treating this,” said Matt Whitlock, a GOP strategist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee senior adviser.
Republicans’ growing reliance on bad polling to ease their pain reflects the dour mood gripping the party. With less than three weeks until Election Day, Republicans are increasingly pessimistic about their prospects, as persistent inflation, high prices on everyday items, elevated mortgage rates and a lingering war in the Middle East hamper campaigns. On Wednesday, the Labor Department reported inflation accelerated more than expected in September driven by soaring gas prices, the latest blow to Republicans who are facing voters’ ire over cost-of-living concerns.
And this week, top Republican super PACs aligned with Trump and congressional Republican leadership pulled money from a handful of GOP House members seeking reelection. Senior House Republicans have privately concluded that the chamber is all but gone and party leaders are shifting resources to save the Senate.
Both the White House and RNC said polls have sold short GOP support. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said “underestimating” Trump and his administration “have proven the experts and pollsters wrong every single time,” while RNC national press secretary Natalie Baldassarre added that “bed-wetting strategists who aren't in the game always take the bait.”
“Republicans are united in exposing the far-left’s extreme agenda and will leave it all on the table to defy history in November,” she said.
But the polling, like the economic headwinds, has only worsened in recent weeks. Democrats hold a roughly 9-point national lead on the generic congressional ballot, up from about 6.5 points around Labor Day. That’s slightly wider than the Democrats’ lead at this point in 2018, when the party rode a blue wave to a 41-seat gain in the House. Senate seats in GOP strongholds such as Texas, Alaska, Iowa and Kansas are in play, as independent voters sour on the president and his policies.
Still, GOP strategist Colin Reed said the polling industry is “very much in transition” and that making predictions in the Trump era is a “risky gambit.”
GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini, co-founder of Echelon Insights, found that in three Midwestern states — Iowa, Michigan and Ohio — 93 percent of Senate polls overestimated the Democratic candidate’s performance. In both midterm and presidential election years, polls a month out from the election were off by an average of more than 6 points in Democrats’ favor.
“We can get the environment right, but the map wrong,” Ruffini said. “Even if you buy this idea of a Democratic wave, a good Democratic year, a very solidly pro-Democratic environment, we should be concerned about the track record of the polls — particularly in some of these red states where there have been some pretty large misses, and especially in the Midwest.”
Part of the challenge is no one knows what the midterm electorate will look like, making it hard to know if the polling is accurate. A White House official, who like others in this story was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they didn't think that Black voters would show up for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, but it’s unclear whether that means they vote for Republican Mike Rogers — or just stay home.
"There is a narrative building process in all of these different polls,” the official said, adding that “it's different in every state. There's not a one-size-fits-all. Whenever you look at which poll is overweighting which subset of voters, they're all over the place."
That’s partly why Trump is appearing in red states — to shape the electorate and make sure it’s reflective of the MAGA coalition that carried him to victory in 2024.
Multiple GOP strategists pointed to 2022 when Democrats outperformed expectations, and held the Senate, even as they lost the House. The Biden White House, even with the loss of the lower chamber, took a victory lap, celebrating the better-than-expected election night as a “good day.”
“Republicans’ only hope in ’26 is that what happened to us in ’22 happens to Democrats in ’26,” said a GOP strategist working on battleground races. “There’s a part of me that thinks there is a scenario where 2022 repeats itself. But if the polling is right … then I think it’s setting up to be one of the worst cycles in history for Republicans.”
Polling over the last decade has struggled to capture Republican voters. The data underestimated Trump’s support in 2016, 2020 and 2024, and Republicans argue similar errors could be happening again this cycle, particularly in competitive Senate races.
“Polling is getting much more difficult to do,” said veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove, adding that if the polls reflect Democratic overperformance “then every one of these races that we’re talking about today — Texas, Michigan, Maine, Alaska, Iowa — they're all within the margin of error.”
An RNC official argued that public polls skew toward Democrats.
“It's not to say that the environment's wildly different from what we anticipated it was going to be, which is a tough one in a midterm, which is what history tells you a midterm environment is going to be,” the person said. “I think generally speaking, the polls are far more pessimistic than the reality is for Republicans in the midterms.”
Text polling has skewed the responses because it overpresents young liberal voters and progressives, especially in states that have a large white population, as many of the Great Plains states do, said a second GOP strategist working on competitive midterm races. Pollsters try to balance their samples, but can only do so much to correct for that.
The strategist also noted that the polling right now reflects a change in the electorate as profound as those seen after Watergate and 9/11.
“It would be so historically unprecedented you’d have to presuppose we’re staring down the barrel of a generational national trauma that no one is aware of,” the strategist said.
Adam Wren contributed to this report.
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