Are the midterm polls overestimating the Democrats?
It’s hard not to wonder. We’ve seen the polls inflate Democrats’ chances many times, but we’ve never seen Democratic candidates doing this well in red states during the Trump era. Recent polls have shown them leading in enough states to take the Senate.
Let’s state it plainly: It is absolutely possible that the polls could be overestimating Democrats. Polls are inherently imprecise, subject to many sources of error, and they could be wrong in much the same way they’ve been before.
Even so, there is no reason to assume that the polls will systematically overstate the Democrats’ standing as they did in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. In fact, the polls haven’t really done so in midterm or off-year elections during the Trump era, including the 2018 or 2022 midterms. Just last November, the polls actually underestimated Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia — and by a lot.
Why haven’t polls overstated Democrats’ chances in recent midterms? One factor seems to be that President Trump excels among a relatively disengaged group of voters who are unlikely to respond to surveys — but who are also unlikely to vote in midterm elections. As a result, the polls — and Democrats — do better in lower-turnout elections, when a highly engaged, poll-taking, Democratic-leaning set of voters shows up. By contrast, in the last three presidential elections, many of these hard-to-reach Trump supporters did show up to vote, creating problems for pollsters.
Of course, the polls still aren’t perfect, even in midterms. There are many other factors that determine the accuracy of polls in a given election. Importantly, these factors are not consistent from race to race, pollster to pollster or year to year. In one state, undecided voters might break toward Democrats; in another, Republicans. Or one year, a pollster’s likely voter model or its techniques for “weighting” — a statistical adjustment in which pollsters give more weight to underrepresented groups — might tend to overestimate one side or another.
These other factors don’t usually get as much attention as the hypothesized “shy Trump” voter, but they play a huge role in the success of polls. That’s especially true in lower-profile elections, when turnout is more volatile, the candidates aren’t well known, and voters are less engaged. They can even add up to make the polls underestimate Democrats, even though Democrats are more likely to answer surveys.
There’s one other reason polls might not err as they did in the past: They’ve changed enormously since the dawn of the Trump era. The old “gold standard” pollsters are essentially extinct; the polls that remain, gold standard or not, rely on new methods of contacting voters and different weighting practices, including some designed to counteract the tendency of polls to underestimate Mr. Trump’s support.
These big changes won’t necessarily yield improved poll results, but they make it much harder to assume that polls will simply err just as they did before. Indeed, the polling error was very different in 2022 and 2024 than earlier in the Trump era. Then, key states like Wisconsin, where white working-class voters flocked to Mr. Trump, were ground zero for polling error. Over the last few cycles, the polls have actually been pretty good in Wisconsin but quite bad in a more diverse set of states, like Florida and New Jersey, where some pollsters’ heavy-handed weighting techniques may have caused them to miss swings in the electorate.
With all of these factors in flux, it’s easy for polls to be off in many different directions. The only thing that’s guaranteed is that the polls won’t be exactly right. They’re just not precise enough. As a result, Republicans could easily hold the Senate even if the polls don’t systematically underestimate Republican strength.
To take the last round of New York Times/Siena University polls as an example, Democrats led only in enough polls to claim a bare 51-49 majority; even a single state going the other way would yield Republican control of the chamber. It would be entirely normal for the polls to be off in a few states, even in a “good” year for them.
The 2018 election is a great example. On average, the polls had a very good year. By some measures, they actually slightly underestimated Democrats. But Republicans outperformed the polls in a handful of key Senate races in red states like Indiana, Missouri and Tennessee. The polls underestimated Democrats in other races, like Arizona, Nevada and Texas, but deep red states were enough to clinch the Senate for the Republicans, despite a “blue wave” of Democratic support that year.
The 2018 election is a helpful reminder of the risks facing pollsters this cycle. As was the case back then, control of the Senate will most likely be decided this year in reliably Republican states like Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Kansas. This doesn’t guarantee that the polls will overstate the Democrats’ chances in such races as they did in 2018, for all of the reasons mentioned previously. But it does mean that the election will be decided in these states by a group of conflicted, Republican-leaning voters who disapprove of the president. If Republicans can win enough of them back over the final stretch, they hold the Senate. It’s that simple.
With Mr. Trump’s approval rating in the 30s and plenty of favorable candidate matchups for Democrats, it’s entirely possible that enough of these Republican-leaning voters will vote for Democrats or simply stay home. The president’s approval rating today is nearly 10 points lower than it was in 2018. Back then, Mr. Trump was popular in Indiana, Missouri and Tennessee. In the most recent Times/Siena polls, his approval rating was less than 41 percent in every key red-state Senate race.
At the same time, who could be surprised if Republicans ultimately vote Republican? It’s shaky ground for a polling lead to stand on, even if today’s polls could be something we know they’re not: perfect representations of the electorate.
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