2026 Election Postscript Conference
December 8, 2026 | Washington, D.C.
Campaigns & Elections
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Republicans leaned on a familiar argument to reassure supporters that the midterms weren’t a lost cause for the party: The polls are wrong.
“Republicans are no longer responding to polls,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said during an appearance on Fox News late last month. “I’m telling you these polls are off, all of them, because they’re using faulty analysis.”
There was at least some truth to the claims. Pre-election polls, writ large, were off. Just not in the way that Republicans had hoped.
Leading up to Election Day, polling showed Democrats on track to win the national popular vote in all House races by an average of 9 points. That now looks like an underestimate. The New York Times projects that the final margin for Democrats will be something closer to 13 percentage points.
While the big picture captured by pollsters – that voters fed up with the cost of living and an unpopular president would help Democrats make meaningful gains in Congress – was ultimately accurate, the final results could also underscore lingering challenges for election polling.
If the average error across every type of contest ends up around 4 percentage points, it would be larger than the average error in both the 2018 and 2022 midterms, according to a 2024 analysis of pre-election polling by the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
An analysis from Pew Research Center found that, in 23 of 27 races for governor and U.S. Senate this year, polling understated Democrats’ margin of victory by 2 points or more. The mean understatement for Democrats across all 27 races sits at around 4 percentage points, according to Pew.
In the wake of President Donald Trump’s upset 2016 election win, political pollsters have made significant changes to their methodologies. At the same time, they’ve had to cope with growing skepticism among many voters, who have become wary of polling’s ability to accurately capture the political climate.
But there are still plenty of bright spots for pollsters in the wake of last week’s midterms.
Pre-election surveys largely succeeded in capturing voters’ simmering frustration and dissatisfaction with the economy, the ongoing war with Iran and Trump. And polls regularly showed a wide enthusiasm gap, with Democrats far more motivated to vote in the midterms than Republicans.
Yet the reasons for pollsters’ underestimation of Democrats’ margin of victory remain a matter of speculation. One Democratic pollster, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss the polling landscape, said that polling firms may have simply overcorrected in the wake of recent elections that saw Republicans – and particularly Trump – outperform expectations.
“Consciously or not, I think there’s always this question in the back of your mind that’s essentially: ‘we’ve underestimated the Republicans before, so are we at risk of doing it again?” the pollster said. “But also, no one can look at the forecasts this time and say that polls were way off. We erred on the side of caution, but that’s better than the opposite.”
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