Democrats Lead by 9 Points in US Election Polls
Republicans hope the events of the 2022 midterm elections will repeat, when Democrats, despite unfavorable polls, performed better than expected and retained their majority in the Senate.
3 weeks before the US mid-term elections, various polls show that the Democratic Party has a 9% lead over the Republicans, and the Republican Party has lost hope of winning the House of Representatives and has focused on Senate seats in competitive states.
According to Ambassador Arjan, quoted by the Politico website, Republicans are increasingly hoping that the polls are wrong ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, as Democrats are leading by almost 9 percent nationally, and Republican leaders are saying in private circles that they see the House of Representatives as lost and should focus on not losing their majority in the Senate.
Of course, the Republicans have another hope, and that is that the polls are wrong. Republican strategists argue that polls have repeatedly underestimated Trump and Republican voters, particularly in Midwestern states.
They are hoping for a repeat of the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats outperformed expectations and retained their majority in the Senate despite unfavorable polls.
If current polls are accurate, 2026 could turn out to be one of the worst election cycles in Republican history, a Republican strategist has warned.
Part of the challenge is that no one knows what midterm voters will look like, making it difficult to tell if a poll is accurate.
According to some Republican strategists, this has happened in other periods as well. In 2024, Donald Trump outperformed the final poll averages in all seven swing states, and in 2016 he did significantly better than the national polls.
Politico's report was based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including longtime Republican operatives, election observers, campaign strategists and officials. Most acknowledged that the national climate for Republicans is bad and has gotten worse in the past few months. But they say even a small sampling error could completely change the outcome of election night for the Republican Party.
Matt Whitlock, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser to the Republican National Committee, said: "Part of the challenge here is that the polls haven't yet been able to model how to model GOP voters who either don't answer the phone or don't really care about the polls, and so I think there's more reason to be skeptical of the polls given the Senate map at the overall level than there is to see how the media and the Democrats are treating this. Guess the subject."
Republicans' increasing reliance on the possibility of polling errors to soothe their pain reflects the chill that has gripped the party. Less than three weeks before Election Day, Republicans are increasingly pessimistic about their prospects as persistent inflation, high prices for everyday items, rising mortgage rates and a protracted war in the Middle East mar the campaign. On Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that inflation rose more than expected in September due to a sharp rise in gasoline prices, the latest blow to Republicans facing anger from voters over cost-of-living concerns.
And this week, top GOP political action committees aligned with Trump and congressional Republican leadership took money from a handful of Republican House members seeking re-election. Top House Republicans have concluded privately that the chamber is almost lost, and party leaders are shifting resources to save the Senate.
Both the White House and the Republican National Committee said polls showed little support for Republicans. White House press secretary Davis Ingle said the "underestimation" of Trump and his administration "has proven the pundits and pollsters wrong time and time again," while Natalie Baldassari, national press secretary of the Republican National Committee, added that "the unscrupulous strategists who are not in the game always take the bait."
"Republicans are united in exposing the extreme agenda of the far left and will put everything on the table to defy history in November," he said.
Trump also claimed last week that contrary to polls, there will be a big surprise in the midterm elections.
But the polls, like the economic woes, have worsened in recent weeks. Democrats have a nearly 9 percent national lead in general elections for Congress, up from about 6.5 percent around Labor Day. That's slightly more than the Democrats' lead at this point in 2018, when the party won 41 seats in the House on a sweeping blue wave. Senate seats in Republican strongholds like Texas, Alaska, Iowa and Kansas are also hotly contested, as independent voters are unhappy with the president and his policies.
However, GOP strategist Colin Reed said the polling industry is "very much in transition" and forecasting in the Trump era is a "dangerous game."
Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights, found that in three Midwestern states — Iowa, Michigan and Ohio — 93 percent of Senate polls overestimated the Democratic candidate's performance. In both midterm and presidential election years, polls taken a month before the election have averaged more than 6 points in favor of Democrats.
"We can get the environment right, but the map is wrong," Ruffini said. "Even if you accept this idea of a Democratic wave, a good year for the Democrats, a very pro-Democrat environment, we have to worry about polling history — especially in some of these red states where there have been very big losses, and especially in the Midwest."
Part of the challenge is that no one knows how midterm voters will fare, making it difficult to tell if the poll is accurate. A White House official, who, like others in the report, asked to remain anonymous for the sake of clarity, said they don't think black voters in Michigan will vote for Democratic Senate candidate Abd al-Sayed, but it's unclear whether that means they'll vote for Republican Mike Rogers or just stay home.
"There's a narrative process going on in all these different polls," the official said, adding, "It's different in every state. There's no one-size-fits-all version. Whenever you look at which polls matter most to which subset of voters, things are different."
That's why Trump is showing up in red states - to shape the electorate and make sure it represents the MAGA coalition that carried him to victory in 2024.
Several Republican strategists pointed to 2022 in which Democrats exceeded expectations and retained the Senate, even as they lost the House. Even after losing the House, Biden's White House celebrated and celebrated the better-than-expected election night as a "good day."