On Nov. 9, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to wonder how the polls could have been so wrong. “Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest,” the president wrote. “How could the Polls be so wrong???” The same day, Scott Colom, the Democratic candidate in Mississippi’s still-uncalled Senate race, complained that political prognosticators who called the contest safely Republican made it “much more difficult to fundraise and are part of the reason the South has been neglected for so long.”
Is this narrative of a massive polling and forecasting miss right?
Expert handicappers whiffed on Mississippi and on other seemingly unlikely Democratic victories in the House. But most pollsters performed in line with historical expectations. The president’s advisers may have been showing him surveys from right-leaning outfits that performed well in the 2024 presidential race. Those did worse than others this year.
How the polls did
I used our historical polling database at FiftyPlusOne to select every public poll released in the final three weeks of the campaign for House, Senate and governor races, plus the national generic ballot — 373 polls of 88 contests in all. I then compared them to the results of the midterm elections as of 7:04 a.m. EST on Nov. 10. On average this year, the polls underestimated support for Democrats across races by 3.4 points.
That’s worse than a typical year. Since 1998, the polls in an average cycle have missed by about 2.8 points in one direction or the other. But misses tend to come in two sizes: In half of those cycles, the polls missed by a point or less. This year’s miss is the fourth-largest of the 15, behind 2020 (6.3 points in Republicans’ favor), 1998 (3.8 points in Democrats’ favor, also in a midterm) and 2016. That puts the polls on par with their performance in 2012, 2014 and 2024. The miss was also even across offices: House, Senate and governor polls each underestimated Democrats by about 3.3 points.
So why were so many election watchers so surprised at the polling error last week? One explanation is that they were caught off guard by the direction of the miss, as the polls have recently tended to underestimate Republicans, not Democrats. That’s fair psychologically, if not statistically. The final average of generic-ballot polls had Democrats up 9 points nationally, and on current counts they’re winning the national House vote by about 13 points. If that holds, it would be the largest underestimate of Democrats on the generic ballot since 1986.
It’s looking more like the secret sauce these pollsters were adding to their surveys to make them look accurate was just pro-Republican bias.
Another is that Democrats are winning in places that would have been shocking just two years ago. Colom’s race in Mississippi is a good example. The only public poll of Mississippi’s Senate race in the final three weeks, from Change Research on Oct. 21-22, had him trailing Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith 43% to 40%, with another candidate, Ty Pinkins, at 6%. With nearly all the vote counted, Colom is narrowly ahead, making for a roughly 4-point error (some of which may be Pinkins’ voters breaking for Colom late). But … come on, Mississippi? A Democrat winning? That is unthinkable from the vantage point of 2024.
The ‘bad pollsters’ were the usual suspects
A narrower explanation for Trump’s shock is that he was looking at the wrong pollsters. The firms that missed worst this year were the ones that usually lean Republican and get shared on GOP-leaning social media, including the president’s service, Truth Social.
Consider the polls in Texas. Seventeen pollsters surveyed the Senate race in the final three weeks, and their average had Democrat James Talarico up about 3 points over Republican Ken Paxton. As of Tuesday, Talarico was winning by about 12 points. That 9-point error is quite large, even considering a neutral selection of the pollsters.
For instance, polls from the Trafalgar Group — led by Rob Cahaly, a frequent guest of right-leaning cable networks who has worked with GOP campaigns in the past — leaned 3.6 points toward Republicans this year, compared with other pollsters in the same races. Also compared with other polls in the same races from 2016 to 2024, Trafalgar leaned Republican by 3.8 points. InsiderAdvantage leaned 2.1 points to the right this year and 1.5 points historically. Surveys from co/efficient and Echelon Insights, two prominent Republican campaign pollsters, also understated support for Democrats (in Echelon’s case, by a little less).
In 2024 other pollsters underestimated Republicans by about 3 points in the races Trafalgar and InsiderAdvantage surveyed. Trafalgar’s polls missed by just 0.3 and InsiderAdvantage’s by 0.6. Quantus, which polled the presidential race, was off by an average of 0.2 points in the races it surveyed, while other pollsters in those races underestimated Trump by 2.4. This made these firms look like geniuses.
However, with a new election under their belt, it’s looking more like the secret sauce these pollsters were adding to their surveys to make them look accurate was just pro-Republican bias. That works when all the other polls understate support for Republicans, but adds even more error to your surveys when Democrats are the ones being underestimated.
To be clear, it’s not like the nonpartisan pollsters had a good year, either. Polls from neutral and highly respected outfits, such as The New York Times/Siena University, YouGov and Marist University, all underestimated Democrats too. They just understated them by less than the historically GOP-leaning pollsters.
The wrong lesson from past misses
After the polls underestimated Republicans in 2016, 2020 and 2024, the conventional wisdom hardened into a rule that polls are biased against the GOP. Firms that leaned right, meanwhile, got credit for “getting it right.” In August, Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights, wrote a widely shared analysis noting that Senate polls had overestimated Democrats “for four cycles in a row,” and he pointed to summer polls showing Democrats ahead in Ohio, Texas and Alaska as the same pattern playing out again. From this, many poll watchers concluded that polls would overstate Democrats again.
This turned out to be a fatally flawed assumption. Anyone who adjusted their analyses in favor of Republicans, whether by trusting the right-leaning firms or by assuming another GOP miss, ended up further from the result than the plain averages. Forecasters rated Mississippi’s Senate race “safe Republican,” as Colom pointed out, even though the only late poll had it within 3 points.
The day before the election, we warned at FiftyPlusOne that you can’t tell in advance which way the polling miss will go. Since 1998 there has been almost no relationship between one cycle’s polling error and the next. (Statistically speaking, there is even a slight negative correlation between cycles; when polls overshoot Democrats in one year, they tend to undershoot them the next.)
So one lesson from 2026 is that analysts should not push poll numbers toward Democrats in 2028, any more than analysts should have pushed them toward Republicans in October. Expect the polls to miss by a few points, and don’t assume you know the direction.
The other lesson is to not overindex on recent apparent wins by individual firms. It is possible for firms to get lucky for a few cycles in a row just because other pollsters happen to be off, or because their methods work in one environment and not another. You should judge pollsters on their record over many elections rather than on whether they leaned the right way once.
The post The pollsters who ‘nailed’ 2024 just whiffed on 2026 appeared first on MS NOW.
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