Why experts aren’t sold on Democrats’ polling advantage

Pollsters and Republican political operatives aren’t fully buying the Democratic polling leads that project the minority party to flip the House and possibly win back the Senate, a task considered herculean at the start of the 2026 election cycle.Heading into the weekend, polls showed Democrats holding an advantage of more than 8 points over Republicans on generic House ballots, leading most analysts to believe that the chamber will flip majorities in November.Races are tighter in the Senate, but Democrats still hold slight leads in polls tracking races in Alaska, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas. Iowa and Kansas, both traditionally viewed as Republican strongholds, are virtually tied. Democrats need to win four of those races to take over the Senate majority. President Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2024 and enjoyed greater success among minority voters than any other Republican presidential candidate in history. But heading into 2026, many view the president as a drag on the GOP, with polls indicating that Republican voters have been turned off by the war with Iran and the elevated prices at home that have come with the conflict.But Republicans still hope Democratic margins may evaporate, based on recent historical precedent, and are pointing to several factors that could suggest closer-than-projected results on Election Day.Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini wrote on X this week that pre-election polls in the 2018-2024 cycles have overstated Democratic performance by more than six points in Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio. In both 2020 and 2024, general election years, the average Democratic overrepresentation was 6.2 points but slightly higher, 6.6 points, during the 2018 and 2022 midterm cycles.Ruffini added that, in the 2026 cycle, polls commissioned by Democratic campaigns are giving Democrats a 6.2 point advantage over Republicans, but with nonpartisan polls, the advantage shrinks to 2.6 points and is “consistent with cooking the books to show tight races and juice fundraising across the map.”Furthermore, there is a chance that Republicans, dissatisfied with Trump’s job in office, are simply not responding to surveys but still plan to cast ballots for the GOP.Chaz Nuttycombe, the executive director of the nonpartisan State Navigate, noted that the group’s recent poll in Iowa, which gave Democrats a 3-5 point advantage in the state, had trouble reaching rural Republicans to gauge their opinions.“Rural Iowa R’s ignored our survey,” he wrote. “We think this could be a Canary in the Cornfields for Iowa polling this year.”Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics and a lecturer at Ohio State University’s department of political science, noted that Democratic leads in traditionally Republican states fail to factor in that currently undecided voters are “probably triple Trump voters” which likely means “reversion [to voting Republican] in the end.”“Of course the steelman case for a Democratic Senate is just [waves hands around] all this,” he said.Ultimately, Republican operatives working with the president’s outside political operation generally agree with Trende’s analysis. Those people concede that reliable Trump voters may be turned off by a number of issues, not to mention the fact that the party in power typically fares poorly in midterm cycles, but remain confident that the president’s final-month midterm push will sufficiently drive turnout to hold on to at least one congressional majority.“It’s not a secret that, like, the trick for us is convincing MAGA voters to turnout when there might be things that they don’t love that the president is doing right now. It’s not rocket science,” one veteran Trump campaign aide told the Washington Examiner. “Luckily, many of these voters aren’t necessarily super locked in on the actual policies. That’s why POTUS is going to be campaigning his ass off until Election Day. That’s why he’s doing those rallies. Pack the room. Remind them why they voted for him in the first place. Juice the batteries. Trust the process.”The president spent the first five days of October campaigning in reliably red states: Alabama, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas. On Saturday, he’ll hold a rally in Tennessee.IS TRUMP’S SON-IN-LAW AND TOP NEGOTIATOR A MIDTERM LIABILITY FOR REPUBLICANS?But Trump isn’t exclusively campaigning in MAGA country. On Friday, he traveled to Syracuse, New York, a trip ostensibly touting his economic and manufacturing agenda in support of Republican New York gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman, which followed a speech to Baltimore County, Maryland, earlier in the week to announce a billion-dollar shipbuilding initiative.A former senior Trump aide told the Washington Examiner that the president’s team believes that those types of trips may help to drive Republican turnout in other parts of the state, where there are more competitive contests.