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Election pollsters have made big changes over the past decade following significant election misses. While polls were more accurate in 2022 and 2024 than in 2020, Tuesday’s midterm election provides another major test.
One big challenge pollsters face is differential response rates across partisan groups. A Washington Post-Schar School poll of Kansas voters last week found registered Democrats were more than twice as likely as registered Republicans to complete the survey after answering an interviewer’s call — 32 percent versus 12 percent.
And on Sunday, the New York Times reported that White Democrats were about 30 percent likelier to take the survey than White Republicans in their final state-level polls this year, a bit higher than in final polling in 2020.
To account for this, pollsters contact more voters in groups that respond at lower rates. For instance, pollsters for the Post-Schar School Kansas poll made thousands of additional calls to Republicans to ensure they were represented in line with their share of the electorate.
A second and increasingly common method is weighting polls by past presidential voting, which ensures that supporters of President Donald Trump and former vice president Kamala Harris, as well as nonvoters, are represented in proportion to the previous election’s results.
This “recalled” vote weighting improved the accuracy of many polls in 2024 and has been adopted by The Post, the Pew Research Center, the New York Times and many other pollsters. But lower-turnout midterm elections pose unique challenges, and Tuesday’s results will provide a fresh indication of how effective pollsters’ changes were at improving accuracy.
Read more about how to understand midterm election polls in The Pollwatcher.
There’s a Tuesday night in November that captivates the nation, leaving households on the edge of their couch cushions as they await the results. This week is no different.
The College Football Playoff will release this season’s first round of rankings in its annual made-for-TV ESPN special tonight at 7 p.m.
For the sixth time in its 12-year history, the CFP’s first rankings reveal of the season coincides with Election Day. As a handful of states close their polls, teams and fans will learn where they stand entering the final month before the postseason. The same ratings collision unfolded during the 2024 presidential election.
In past years, when the show ran on the same night as election coverage, its viewership dipped from well over 1 million to an estimated 800,000. But neither ESPN nor the CFP expressed concern over the alignment.
Each Tuesday night from the first week of November through the end of the regular season, the CFP committee releases rankings that help schools understand how they’re viewed by the committee that will ultimately decide whether they compete for a national championship in December.
This fall’s edition, as little as it may be viewed, is especially intriguing. Only three teams remain undefeated, the fewest since 2014. The biggest surprise? No SEC team is without a loss, while Georgia and Kentucky are the conference’s only schools with one loss. Chaos. This may also be the last iteration of the 12-team playoff, as the CFP and ESPN are reportedly pursuing an expansion to 24 teams as soon as next year.
The Justice Department has deployed roughly 1,000 election monitors to observe voting at polling sites Tuesday, and nearly two-thirds of the jurisdictions chosen have consistently voted for Democrats in recent elections, according to a Washington Post analysis.
The department described the deployment as a record-setting effort to ensure election integrity at polling locations in more than 120 jurisdictions in all 50 states.
Though department monitors are dispatched every Election Day, this effort has prompted anxieties among Democrats who say they worry it will allow the Trump administration to interfere with the election or cast doubt on the results.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, maintained in a statement Tuesday the monitors were sent to pursue “transparency for elections in an assertive and nondiscriminatory manner.”
Of the jurisdictions the department selected for monitoring Tuesday, at least 89 voted for the Democratic candidate in the most recent three presidential election years. At least 29 consistently voted Republican, and five have swung between the parties at least once during the last three presidential cycles.
During the 2022 midterms, the Biden administration sent Justice Department monitors to 24 states, including to Democratic-leaning jurisdictions in roughly the same proportion as this year’s deployment, The Post’s analysis found.
Typically, Democratic administrations are interested in monitoring voting in heavily Democratic areas such as large cities because of concerns over voter disenfranchisement, language barriers and access to the ballot. This year, President Donald Trump and his allies have accused Democrats of attempting to cheat and pushed for greater federal control over how voting is conducted — claims that have largely been rejected by federal courts.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the United States would end $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel at the end of this year, following previous discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 2016, President Barack Obama signed a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding with Israel to provide at least $38 billion to subsidize purchases of weapons, mostly made in the United States. The agreement was due to expire at the end of 2028.
Trump said, however, that the funding will end early.
“We were giving them $4 billion — we are — but it gets cut off at the end of the year,” Trump said in a phone call with Fox News in which he cast the announcement partly as a bow to domestic political reality. Direct aid to Israel has become less popular in both parties, but especially among Democrats, who are likely to take control of at least one chamber of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Trump pointed to Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who has made a cutoff of aid to Israel a campaign issue.
“They don’t need it,” Trump said, referring to Israel. “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point.”
Netanyahu has said in recent months that he anticipated U.S. aid will wind down and has repeatedly called on Israel to strengthen its own defense production. In a visit to a West Bank settlement in May, the prime minister said that Israel “needs to free ourselves from dependence.”
Netanyahu’s advisers have long said they anticipated that U.S. public opinion would eventually turn against direct military aid.
Instead of financial support, Netanyahu has pushed for deeper military, intelligence and industrial integration with the United States to be written into the upcoming fiscal 2027 U.S. defense spending bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act.
Israel critics in Washington say that if it is written into law, the two militaries would be intertwined more deeply than ever.
At least 40 jurisdictions across the United States are voting Tuesday on measures related to data centers. The bulk of the measures are in Ohio, where 18 cities and towns will weigh in on whether to restrict or permit data centers in some way.
Significant majorities of Americans oppose the construction of new data centers, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
Ohio has been one of the states at the focus of the United States’ rapid data center build-out, receiving billions of dollars in investment touted by President Donald Trump during campaign rallies. Data centers have also dominated advertising in the Senate race between Republican incumbent Sen. Jon Husted and Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown.
The jurisdictions voting on data centers range significantly in size, from Joliet Township, Illinois, a city of 85,000, to 624-person Monroe Township in Ohio’s Adams County. A half-dozen municipalities in Maine and Illinois will also weigh in on data centers.
Many of the ballot measures are temporary or permanent bans on data centers. Voters moving en masse Tuesday to enact those bans would be another signal of Americans’ wider discontent against the artificial intelligence industry.
Additional Coverage
- October 21, 2026
Most Americans want to halt all data center construction
Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corporation, acknowledged Monday that Fox News is suffering from a dip in its ratings but chalked it up to “viewer fatigue” after a year of tumultuous news events.
Murdoch on a quarterly earnings call said that declining year-over-year ratings are in part due to a monumental 2025: the presidential inauguration, the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, the actions of the U.S. DOGE Service under Elon Musk and deadly flooding.
Fox News, known for its news and conservative opinion programming, is a cable TV juggernaut, regularly outperforming rival networks.
Murdoch told investors and Wall Street analysts that viewers are watching less TV, not defecting to competitors. “Those viewers are not going to any other news channel,” he said. “They’re not switching to MS NOW or to CNN.”
For the week of Oct. 19, Fox News brought in 1.7 million prime-time viewers, walloping MS NOW (954,000) and CNN (632,000). Still, Fox’s prime-time audience was down 23 percent from the same week a year prior.
Meanwhile, MS NOW and CNN grew 30 percent and 28 percent, respectively, according to Nielsen data published by Adweek.
In a Tuesday earnings call, Mark Lazarus — the CEO of Versant, MS NOW and CNBC’s parent company — said he’s not seeing news fatigue among the networks’ viewers.
A British man has returned home after a 31,000-mile walk around the world that lasted 28 years.
Karl Bushby, a former paratrooper, was greeted by crowds his hometown of Hull in northern England on Monday, before arriving at his final destination: the home of his mother, Angela.
The idea for the journey was born in a bar, when Bushby, then in his 20s, made a bet that he could walk from the southern end of South America back to England. “Suddenly, it became a challenge,” he told The Washington Post last year.
His only rules: He would not use transport to propel himself forward, and he wouldn’t go home until he got there by foot.
Bushby set off from Chile in 1998 and walked across the Americas, Asia and Europe — navigating the perils of the Darién Gap and the frozen Bering Strait. He swam across the Caspian Sea and the English Channel.
On the penultimate day of his journey, he reunited with family members — including his son Adam, 36 — and met his granddaughter, 12, for the first time, according to the BBC.
A documentary is under production, and Bushby says he plans to write a book.
But, for now, he told a news conference Monday: “I think I’m hanging my boots up.”
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