Midterm Polls Again Misleading?

After each national election cycle in recent years, the pollsters and their establishment media enablers, faced with so many key polling errors, try to assure us they will fix this problem in the next cycle.

The new cycle arrives, however, and the faulty polls continue.

The 2026 national midterm cycle is now well underway and – surprise, surprise – many key polls have been way off, even many fielded just before the primary elections.

It would be more understandable if the errors occurred in the polling of candidates of both major political parties, but that has rarely been the case. Almost always, the support for Republican candidates has been under-measured and support for their Democrat opponents over-measured.

This chronic bias has a new twist in 2026.

This cycle, the establishment media is promoting the rise of the overtly socialist movement within the Democrat Party. Although the success of these radical neo-Marxist candidates has so far been limited to mostly blue states and large urban areas, the media has promoted it as the dominant trend in the liberal party.

Throughout the campaign period until now, many establishment polls have reported significantly more support for radical Democrat candidates than they actually received in their primary elections. This includes notably many polls taken just before the voting when polls are supposed to be most accurate.

In the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, for instance, some polls showed socialist candidate Francesca Hong with as much as a 20-point lead heading into Election Day, only for her to lose outright to more moderate candidate David Crowley. In Michigan, radical candidate Abdul El-Sayed was victorious in the Democrat Senate primary, but he won by just one point after most polls had him leading by double digits.

These results should cast doubt on several major polls showing Republican Senate nominees trailing Democrat challengers in usually red states, including Ohio and Texas. Additionally, some major polls show GOP incumbents who normally win, including Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, trailing their Democrat opponents. Finally, several recent polls are showing usually “safe” GOP seats as competitive, including Kansas, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska.

In Michigan, polls have shown El-Sayed ahead of GOP nominee Mike Rogers. In Minnesota, leftist Democrat nominee Peggy Flanagan leads GOP nominee Michelle Tafoya. In New Hampshire, most polls also have shown likely Republican nominee John Sununu, who previously served in the Senate from 2003 to 2009, trailing the likely Democrat nominee, Rep. Chris Pappas, with the primary scheduled for September 8.

Although North Carolina and Georgia have recently voted for Republicans for president, polls show the Democrat nominees in those two states way ahead of their GOP Senate opponents – by eight points in North Carolina and 7.5 points in Georgia, according to the latest Real Clear Politics (RCP) polling averages. In these cases, the Democrats’ lead is credible, but the margins are questionable.

It is fair to note that President Trump’s low poll numbers (although these too should be viewed with skepticism), the unpopularity of the war in the Middle East, and inflation fears, including the higher price of gasoline, are concerns for many Republican House and Senate candidates. But as always, it is important to remember that voter attitudes and decisions can change dramatically between the end of August and Election Day. However, this does not justify pollsters producing inaccurate voter poll numbers.

The steady decline of political polling became more acute several decades ago as the novelty of one’s opinion being included in a public survey wore off and suspicion about the motives of the pollsters increased. Privacy issues arose. Fake and manipulated polls abounded. Many polls today are intended to sway public opinion rather than reflect it.

The original polling techniques and quality standards became very expensive, too expensive for most pollsters who were, after all, operating a business. Inevitably, shortcuts were taken, each of which could negatively impact statistical accuracy. Pollster adjustments to raw polling data became more and more subjective.

One underreported aspect of polling that influences the accuracy of survey data is response rate. Because of polling’s statistical underpinnings, pollsters want a response rate on their initial contact to be as close to 100 percent as possible. The more people a pollster must contact to get a response, the less likely the poll will accurately measure that response.

For example, a pollster who calls 100 people in order to get 50 responses will almost certainly have a more accurate result than a pollster who must contact 500 people to get 50 responses.

Additionally, pollsters have increasingly underestimated the range of their polling error. A margin of error of one to four points is considered acceptable. But for years now, most polls have had a true margin of error close to double digits on the raw data. At that level, a poll is, in practical terms, useless.

To fix this critical problem, pollsters increasingly justified “adjusting” their raw poll numbers. Through this process, pollsters manually change the results according to views that they believe, for one reason or another, are over- or under-represented in their sample. As a result, they can artificially reduce the margin of error. But pollsters’ assumptions are often wrong, and this seriously reduces the reliability of the poll.

Some media entities create polling averages by aggregating polls. The most well-known and respected of these is RCP, which has a good track record. This aggregate poll has been criticized by some pollsters because it treats the numbers of each of its component polls equally. Critics want RCP to weight some polls more than others, but RCP refuses to “put its thumb on the scale” — and has better results than those who do.

There is another kind of public opinion poll which is rarely made public. These are the private polls made for individual campaigns, political parties, and others who are seeking a reliable assessment of voter attitudes about their candidates and campaign issues. These are much more accurate than most published polls.

They are also more expensive because pollsters maximize sample size and minimize adjustments. Their clients want accurate information, even if negative, so that they can make changes in their campaign if necessary or continue what they are doing because it is working.

As the 2026 midterm campaigns go into their final weeks, pollsters will face perhaps their greatest test yet. The historic biases of the recent past have diminished the public credibility of much polling, especially with conservatives and many independents. This parallels the general skepticism now felt about the establishment media as a whole.

In the end, any poll is only a guess. As we saw on election night 2004, even exit polls, which are supposed to assess those who have already voted, can be way off the mark. Early exit polls showed John Kerry winning 26 states, including several heavily red states, by surprising margins. In fact, when results were actually counted hours later, George W. Bush clearly won, and the exit polls were discredited.

Polling conducted properly can be useful. But too much polling today is carelessly or improperly run and unreliable. There is little evidence in this cycle so far that 2026 will be any different.