In the Digital Age, in the era of Trump, Democrats have played Charlie Brown too many times. Polling showed they were about to kick that football through the uprights, only for voters to play Lucy and pull the ball out from under them.
The 2024 cycle was particularly harsh for Florida Democrats, who saw the GOP secure their supermajority in Tallahassee and the party lose up and down the ballot. The surveys failed to accurately capture the realignment of the state’s working class and the switch of Hispanic voters to the GOP.
Florida polls showed Kamala Harris in a tight race with Donald Trump. He carried the state by 13.1% – a polling error of some surveys as much as 11%. Aggregators also had Debbie Mucarsel-Powell within striking distance of the U.S. Sen. Rick Scott. He ended up winning by 13%, trouncing the margin of error.
The same story played out in 2020 when many polls had Joe Biden winning the state. He lost by 3.4% as Democratic voters stayed home during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2018, progressive gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson led in the polls leading into Election Day. Both lost.
“Polling is a joke, I don’t know anyone that has ever been polled, and I know I never have been, so I believe they make up whatever they want,” said voter Larry Mosca, a resident of unincorporated Palm Beach County. “I do not believe polling means anything; the media makes up whatever fits their agenda.”
Michael Simmons, 83, of suburban Boca Raton, said pollsters always have a hidden agenda to somehow affect turnout. “I do not trust polling because I believe they are all political,” he said.
Flooding the zone: How low-quality polling became clickbait
For the 2026 midterms, many polls – not all – show tight races for governor between Republican Byron Donalds and Democrat David Jolly, as well as for the U.S. Senate between incumbent Republican Ashley Moody and Democrat Angie Nixon. Dems look particularly competitive in congressional races.
The backlash among Hispanics to Trump’s immigration crackdown is real. A NBC/Telemundo poll showed Democrats with a 24-point lead among Latino voters when asked who should control Congress, double the margin in 2024,
Could it all be a mirage once again for the party out of power in Florida as well as across the U.S.? After all, Florida Republicans have a voter registration edge of 1.5 million and the Democrats’ registration efforts remain remarkably feeble.
“There’s a lot of low-quality polls out right now,” Sean Freeder, who oversees the Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida, said in an interview in September.
Freeder said that during the Florida primary, many firms didn’t know what they were doing.
“Their methodology was pretty bad or nonexistent,” he said. “There are a lot of small polling firms that are used to working with campaigns and being partisan. It doesn’t help our reputation industry-wide.”
As for the PORL poll, it is expected in mid-October.
Good polling exists, but it is harder to find at the statewide and local level. All of it is insatiable clickbait, screamed into the social media canyon and echoed back by the media, the political tourists and the candidates.
“You have people who just continue to put out bad polling. It’s like crack cocaine. People are just going to keep coming back to it because they’re addicted to wish-casting what they want to see in elections,” said Peter Schorsch, publisher of Florida Politics.
Florida Politics has a symbiotic relationship with St. Pete Polls. It also runs a regular feature called the Salt Shaker Test, which examines the accuracy and methodology of polls.
Usually the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald would release a quality poll in late September or early October, Schorsch said. In the vacuum, polls may use methods and assumptions that don’t reflect Florida’s changing electorate, while others are just out to make a name for themselves, he said.
A fake poll in the Los Angeles mayoral primary race that was picked up by the media and amplified on social media further damaged the opinion industry, as well as missed marks in the Michigan and Wisconsin primaries.
How can you distinguish which polls are credible and which polls aren’t?
It’s hard to discern what polls are good and which are an outlier. It all makes it easy to dismiss not only for voters but for the campaigns. When Stetson University released a September poll showing Jolly trailing Donalds by 12 points, the Jolly campaign attacked its demographics, calling it “garbage.” A more recent Mason-Dixon poll showed similar margins but it’s sample, which showed Trump above water in Florida, was questionable.
Democrats point to how polls reversed course in 2025 and underestimated Democrats, with New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger outperforming the polls by 8% and 5%, respectively.
Still, the Republicans are counting on the same polling errors of the last four cycles to repeat. Senate polling from 2018–24 overstated Democrats across Iowa, Ohio and Michigan by an average of 6.2%, a month before Election Day. Republicans Joni Ernst of Iowa and Bernie Moreno of Ohio were underdog winners and are now U.S. senators.
“Democrats should think twice before relying too heavily on the same rosy polling that has historically written Republicans off cycle after cycle, only to be proven wrong come Election Day,” said Bernadette Breslin, national press secretary for the National Republican Senate Committee.
The NRSC notes that in August, the Democratic polling grossly overestimated Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed by roughly 12 points.
From landlines to algorithms: the methodological sea change in polling
Once upon a time, titans like Gallup and Harris developed the science of polling Americans in the days of landlines, when response rates were 36% in 1996. Pollsters these days will be lucky to get 6%.
“It started with answering machines,” said Charles Franklin, a law professor who has directed the Marquette Law School Poll since 2012. “Then it became caller ID and the rise of spam calls – not just telemarketing but genuine fraudulent scams.”
Milty Goss of Coconut Creek won’t answer any queries from pollsters whether it be phone calls or texts. “It’s become so intrusive. I no longer donate to politicians because they share and sell that info.”
As with so much these days, the turning point in public confidence in polling, Harris said, was 2016 and the election of Trump, who sowed mistrust in polling after 2016 surveys missed his MAGA base. As a result, Republicans started not participating.
“You had the president of the United States talking about fake polls,” Franklin said. “So you’ve had the most powerful political figure of a generation consistently saying his numbers are far better than the polls show.”
He wasn’t wrong. Polls failed to anticipate Trump’s wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2016, giving skeptics a concrete reason to doubt the industry. In 2024, respected pollster J. Ann Seltzer released a late October poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris up three points. Trump won Iowa by 13% and filed a lawsuit, since dismissed, against Seltzer.
Today, polling methodologies vary from poll to poll. The gold standard is probability-based online panels in which a pre-recruited group of respondents is selected through random address sampling.
Then there are also opt-in non-probability polls where participants self-select. Pollsters run algorithmic filtering to remove bots and click farms. Another is mixed-mode surveys where pollsters use state voter registration files to send text messages with links to an online questionnaire.
It’s all very expensive, and that’s one reason newspapers have gotten out of the business. “It’s easier and cheaper to do bad polls now, and it’s more expensive and harder to do good polls,” Franklin said.
Schorsch said quality polling can cost anywhere from $25,000 to $30,000 or more.
Freeder added PORL would have had more polls out if not for a cash crunch. “If frankly we had more money from the university or wherever else, we’d probably want to run a poll a month. But we’re using our money strategically.”
A new role for polls: used as a political weapon
Vanessa Brito, a Miami Democratic political data consultant, said polling is now used to shape public opinion, not take it – and to raise money. “We’re using polling as a way to change public opinion and public perception,” she said. “People like to vote for the person they think is winning.”
In August, the respective campaigns released two polls for Congressional District 13. Incumbent Anna Paulina Luna released a Republican internal poll that showed her leading Democrat Leela Gray by 8%. A few weeks later, a Democratic poll showed Gray leading 51% to 46%.
“Polls are being used as a weapon now, and a turnout mechanism rather than a real reality check on what’s actually happening in a horse race,” said political analyst Susan MacManus.
Courtney Kennedy, senior vice president of U.S. Public Affairs at Ipsos, says polling in 2026 has its challenges, but as the election nears, voters can expect polls that adhere to more rigorous science.
“I don’t think polling is broken,” she said. “Is it difficult to get high-quality polls at the state level? Yes, but I do not extrapolate that to national polling, where we actually do have quite a bit of high-quality national polling that is done.”
Adding to the chaos are the nascent prediction markets – pretty much just betting sites – that are now putting odds on election results. “I don’t think that prediction markets influence polling,” Kennedy said. “I think there’s a question as to whether they influence the elections themselves.”
Outliers notwithstanding, 2024 actually saw the polling errors decrease. “So there’s some evidence that things are moving in the right direction,” Kennedy said.
Still, she cautions voters not to draw conclusions from polls aggregated for state races, saying polls have historically been off by 5%. “If the lead is five points or less for a state election, the polls really don’t know,” Kennedy said
John Pacenti is the Government Impact Reporter for The USA TODAY NETWORK-FLORIDA. You can get all of Florida’s best content directly in your inbox each weekday by signing up for the free newsletter, Florida TODAY, at https://palmbeachpost.com/newsletters.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Political polls haven’t disappeared. Trust in them has | Exclusive
Reporting by John Pacenti, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Florida Today
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This story was originally published October 14, 2026 at 10:13 AM.
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