Beware Biased Midterm Election Polls

Since 2016, when only one pollster correctly predicted that Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton, voters have viewed the polls with considerable skepticism. 2026 is shaping up to be another year confirming that their distrust is justified.

Aside from major victories for socialist candidates in high-profile Democrat primaries, perhaps the biggest story of this election season is a series of major polling misses.

The first came in Michigan, where polls showed that eventual nominee Abdul El-Sayed had a double-digit edge over Rep. Haley Stevens. El-Sayed won by one percent.

In Wisconsin, polls showed far-left candidate Francesca Hong ahead by double digits, suggesting that she was the prohibitive favorite in the race. But she ultimately lost to Milwaukee County executive David Crowley.

These election results will likely increase public skepticism about the polls, particularly considering that at least one of the polling firms showing Francesca Hong with a 20-point lead has confessed to deliberately releasing fake numbers.

Median Strategies, which also produced a bogus poll showing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass with a 12-point lead over her primary opponent, shut down its operation and told the Los Angeles Times that it produced the fake polls showing Hong and Bass with implausibly large leads as a social experiment:

“Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification… We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews.”

One can’t help but wonder how many other polling firms are conducting “social experiments” that produce implausibly favorable numbers for socialists and other far-left candidates.

It’s not just a problem on the left, either. Another polling agency, the Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI), surveyed respondents for the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary and admitted after a significant polling miss that it “identified respondents who selected [Jay] Collins but whose broader profile aligned with a competing coalition, and leaned those respondents toward James Fishback.”

Translation? TPSI – which has since been banned by polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne and others – simply ignored who voters told them they supported and instead said they supported another candidate.

This brings us to some research conducted by GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights. He writes, “In the last few election cycles, we’ve seen a pattern of Democrats looking competitive in red state Senate contests during the summer only to fade by election day. I wanted to test if this was a consistent pattern, not just the selective memory of a Republican.”

Ruffini analyzed 3,312 polls over the last four election cycles in the old FiveThirtyEight archive. What he found will not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the polls:

“In each of those four cycles, the Democratic candidate’s margin was overstated. The average polling error across all polls was D+3.7, and 73% of polls released overstated the Democrat relative to the election result … Polling error peaks at 5.9 points too Democratic sometime in late July, and doesn’t start coming down until late August, before settling into an average error of D+2.6 on election day.”

Ruffini also noted that Senate polls in presidential years have been biased toward Democrats, and they remained biased until the very end.

So, in August alone, we have learned two important facts about political polling.

First, it is possible to produce fake polls containing implausible findings, and many corporate media outlets will publish them with little or no vetting.

Second, even when “legitimate” polls are released, nearly three in four of them overstate the strength of Democrats as election campaigns are launched, and few completely correct that bias by Election Day.

This may or may not be intentional. Perhaps the pollsters are simply liberal themselves, and thus their results reflect that bias. But there is also a very real possibility that the majority of the polling industry is in cahoots to depress Republican turnout (“you don’t stand a chance, why bother showing up to vote?”) and energize Democrat turnout in purple and red states.

Although Ruffini focuses on the Senate in his analysis, there can be little doubt that the same patterns manifest themselves in House and gubernatorial polls. Yet most legacy news outlets report pre-election polls, including those which they commissioned, as if their accuracy is unassailable.

It’s important to remember, however, that even honest pollsters face enormous challenges. So-called scientific polling was first introduced 90 years ago in a far different world.

From 1916 to 1932, the only accurate predictions in presidential elections came from a publication called the Literary Digest, which mailed millions of mock ballots to people. It correctly called five consecutive presidential elections. In 1936, however, the Digest predicted that Republican Alf Landon would defeat incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide. Roosevelt won 62 percent to 37 percent. During the same election, George S. Gallup released his first presidential poll, which correctly predicted Roosevelt’s victory.

This ushered in the era of statistical polling, which relied on the random selection of small but ostensibly representative samples of the population. Ironically, this “scientific” polling method had a shorter run of successes than did the Literary Digest before disaster struck. Having called the 1936, 1940, and 1944 presidential elections correctly, the “scientific” pollsters (Gallup and Roper) predicted incumbent President Harry Truman’s defeat in the 1948 election by his Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. Truman won, of course, to their chagrin.

“Dewey’s victory was so expected that the Roper poll had stopped doing surveys in September about the race. The Gallup poll had the race at 45 percent for Dewey and 41 percent for Truman in October. So the night of November 2, the editors of the Chicago Tribune, based on the advice of their Washington editor and a need for an early first edition, approved a gigantic headline that read, ‘Dewey Beats Truman.’”

Truman gleefully held up the Chicago Tribune, complete with its giant headline declaring Dewey the winner, in one of the most famous presidential photos ever taken.

Truman was, by the way, unpopular with the press. According to a blog post in the National Constitution Center, “Only an estimated 15 percent of newspapers nationally supported Truman in the election … What the newspapers and pollsters didn’t understand was Truman’s background as a fighter, and the tendency for voters to wait until closer to Election Day to pick a candidate.”

Does this sound so familiar? The media carpet bombs a president with bad coverage and inaccurate public opinion polls predict his defeat, but voters don’t pay much attention to either.

This is the proper course of action for the voters to take in the upcoming midterms. The corporate media is attempting to turn these congressional elections into a referendum on President Trump, and the pollsters who predict a Democrat wave have a long history of inaccuracy due to bias and ineptitude.

Ignore them, but make sure you vote.