Speaker Johnson says the polls are wrong. His own party doesn’t appear to agree.

Headed into Election Day, it’s not exactly a secret that House Republicans are likely to lose their majority. Democrats only need a net gain of a handful of seats, and all of the available evidence suggests that won’t be a problem.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, however, keeps taking issue with the evidence.

“Republicans are no longer responding to polls,” the GOP leader told Fox News over the weekend. He added, “I’m telling you these polls are off — all of them.”

On Monday night, the Louisiana congressman returned to the network and pushed effectively the same line. “I’m telling you the polling is inaccurate,” the House speaker said.

Maybe so. Maybe Johnson’s right — we can probably all think of instances when polls have been off to one degree or another — and it could be the political world is in for an enormous surprise next week.

But if that were to happen, Republicans themselves would be among those who are shocked.

As a matter of campaign strategy and tactics, I can appreciate why Johnson is pushing this line with so much enthusiasm. He is, after all, Congress’ top GOP lawmaker. If he were openly accepting the available data on public attitudes, the House speaker would effectively have to admit the odds of him holding onto his gavel are poor, which wouldn’t exactly motivate his party’s rank-and-file voters to cast a ballot.

But regardless of Johnson’s motivations, even his own party doesn’t genuinely believe his talking point. We know this for certain because Republicans keep moving campaign money around to protect vulnerable GOP incumbents — not based on pleas and anecdotal evidence, but because of their own polling data.

The same is true for Donald Trump’s campaign schedule. The president hasn’t invested his time in states such as Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi and Kansas — states he won by enormous margins two years ago — because he finds local conditions pleasant this time of year. The White House political operation is deploying Trump in response to polling data, even as Johnson insists that Republicans “are no longer responding to polls.”

Of course they are. There’s nothing else for them to use when making difficult electoral decisions.

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