SALINA, Kan. — Mona Hargrave desperately wants to believe polls that show Adam Hamilton, a Democrat and Methodist minister, ahead of Sen. Roger Marshall (R) in this deep-red state.
But the 66-year-old retiree describes following the rosy-looking polls in the race as a form of “psychological warfare” that’s torturing her and her like-minded friends.
“One day, you read it’s even stephens, and the next day Hamilton is ahead, and then you just get sucked into it,” said Hargrave, who lives in a small city in north-central Kansas that is not used to trusting good news for Democrats.
As they sat at a downtown coffee shop Wednesday, her friend Peggy Hulstine, 74, a retired speech pathologist, was more optimistic. There’s lots of momentum for Hamilton, she said, and “I don’t believe it could possibly be that close.”
Then Margaret Cole, a 69-year-old account representative, interjected from across the table: “That’s what we thought in ’24,” invoking the sting they felt following Kamala Harris’s loss in the presidential race.
Democratic voters and activists find themselves in an odd position less than three weeks before elections that they have been anticipating since Donald Trump won the presidency two years ago. They are eagerly consuming each new poll showing their candidates ahead in races in heavily conservative states spanning Texas, Kansas and Alaska, while simultaneously racked with anxiety that these polls — like ones they dared to believe in the past — could be leading them astray.
Even former president Barack Obama appears to be stressing, as he provided a reality check about Democrats’ sprawling Senate map at a private fundraiser in Virginia this month.
“All these races that are showing we’ve got a two- or three-point lead or it’s a toss-up, we could end up losing all of them by two points,” he said. “It’s within the margin of error.”
As Trump’s popularity has plunged and gas prices have spiked, polls have shown races in deep-red territory such as Kansas within reach for Democrats. To wrest control of the Senate chamber, Democrats would need to flip at least two seats in states where Trump won by double digits just two years ago — a daunting task, but one that polls suggest is well within reach.
That is, if you believe them.
“There’s a little bit of PTSD around being too optimistic,” said Joe Bolkcom, a former Democratic state senator in Iowa, where polls have shown state Rep. Josh Turek (D) in a close race for Senate against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R).
Democrats there have battle scars. Iowa has been under unified Republican control for nearly 10 years, and its gold-standard pollster incorrectly predicted days before the 2024 election that Harris would carry the state. Trump won it by 13 percentage points.
“We’ve just been beaten down,” Bolkcom said. He just had returned from a lunch with Democratic friends where many were wary of believing the polls, he added.
The Democratic nerves extend beyond conservative states to the blue state of Maine, where liberals remember Sen. Susan Collins (R) trailing her Democratic opponent in 2020 in every public poll in October, before she went on to win by more than eight percentage points. A Washington Post-Schar School poll from this month showed Democrat Troy Jackson with a slight edge over Collins.
“We’ve been sure she was going to lose before,” said Lynn Bromley, a former Democratic state senator in Maine. “And she’s still there.”
Even as the Democratic grass roots fret, Republicans in Washington are taking the polls seriously, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into defending heavily conservative seats and privately worrying the blue wave could turn into a deluge, depending on how independents behave on Election Day.
The difficultly of modeling what voters will turn out on Election Day injects uncertainty into the polling process. Polls overestimated Democratic support in the past three presidential election cycles by three to five percentage points, while election surveys were relatively accurate in Trump’s first midterms in 2018 and President Joe Biden’s midterms in 2022, with systematic error less than one point.
Pollsters of both parties have largely defended their methodology this time around, though, and believe they are not facing an epidemic of “quiet” Trump supporters who are under-sampled in polls, which some believe was an issue in the accuracy of 2016 polling.
“We feel very confident … that we’re getting the MAGA voter,” Democratic pollster John Anzalone told reporters this week. “The time when we couldn’t get them is way past.”
The people who eagerly respond to polls are overwhelmingly Democrats, pollsters say, but they have other ways to reach less-responsive conservative voters and weight their final product to correct for the disparity.
“There is that group that isn’t responding that will be there on Election Day — that’s always the case,” said Mitch Brown, a partner at Cygnal, a Republican polling firm. “You have to know that as a pollster in this era. So we’re factoring that in.”
Yet Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said predicting the correct turnout model, even if the problems are understood, remains the biggest challenge. And Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini has been sounding the alarm about polls potentially overestimating Democrats in heavily Republican states, which has happened in past elections.
“It’s smart to be cautious about the polls,” Lake said. “The polls that are showing us wildly ahead are exaggerated. But I think the polls that show us ahead but it’s close, and a lot of races within the margin of error, are accurate.”
Tom Bonier, senior adviser to TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, finds comfort in other data points beyond polls that have suggested GOP enthusiasm is low. That includes Democratic turnout outpacing Republican turnout in the Senate primary in Texas and lower Republican turnout in special elections since Trump was reelected.
“Certainly, the trauma is a real thing,” Bonier said. “The polls don’t have to miss by that much for the outcome to be different than the expectations.”
In Kansas, local Republicans also are latching onto hopes that polls in the state’s competitive race for U.S. Senate could be mistaken, as they have been in the past. Brenda Smith, the local county GOP chair here, said that at a recent fundraiser for Marshall in the nearby town of McPherson, the candidate asked the crowd of about 40 supporters to raise their hands if they had been contacted for a poll. No one did.
“There’s no way they’re neck and neck,” Smith said.
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