Could Republicans prove pollsters wrong in the midterms?

Republicans, who face annihilation in next month’s midterm elections, are clinging to hope that opinion polls are underrepresenting support for Donald Trump’s party.

On the campaign trail this week, House Speaker Mike Johnson joined other party members in questioning whether the polling and betting markets, which point to a Republican rout in the House and possible defeat in the Senate, might be reaching many conservative voters.

“I look right at the camera and I tell you: The polls are wrong,” Johnson told an audience in North Carolina on Thursday.

“Polling organizations are admitting in recent weeks that they have undersampled Republicans (and) that they are oversampling Democrats…because Republicans no longer trust pollsters,” Johnson said.

Polls have consistently underestimated support for Trump in the last three presidential elections, leading to his victory in 2016 and 2024.

Polls in midterm elections, however, have been less prone to big misses, slightly underestimating Democrats in 2022 and 2018. The incumbent president’s party has only managed to net House seats twice in midterms since World War II.

Still, Democrats’ hopes of taking control of the upper chamber hinge on their victories in at least a few states where polls put them ahead by 3 percentage points or less.

If the polls are wrong simply by a margin of error, Republicans could keep all the Senate seats in Maine, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Texas.

“Republicans aren’t as eager to pick up the phone and talk to pollsters about who they voted for … they see it as a much more private matter,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist who has worked on national campaigns.

“If half of what was true in the past is true again, then there’s a good chance the Republicans will win in Texas. They’ll win in Iowa. They’ll win in Maine,” O’Connell said.

Republican insiders such as O’Connell are encouraged that some Senate candidates are performing better than expected in Democratic-controlled states, including New Hampshire and Minnesota.

They also hope that unpopular candidates such as Ken Paxton of Texas will be buoyed by the fact that more popular Republicans, including state Gov. Greg Abbott, are also on the same ballot.

A strategist at a major Trump-aligned group told the FT they were excited about early voting trends in Georgia, which showed those under 35 – who tend to lean Democratic – “were not participating at the same levels as they were in 2022 and 2024”.

They added that the “distribution of undecideds” was much higher in districts with large Republican majorities, making it more difficult to predict turnout. Midterm polls may also struggle to show what conservatives who may not like some of Trump’s policies but who generally support Republicans will do in November.

“National polls still underestimate support for Republicans, and left-wing strategists and newspapers still take the bait,” said Natalie Baldassarre, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, adding that the party “will defy history in November.”

With just over two weeks until Election Day, polls have Democrats ahead in nearly every key race that will decide control of Congress. Such polls were broadly accurate in the 2018 midterm elections during Trump’s first term, while Democrats slightly outperformed polls in the 2022 midterm elections.

Yet the margin of Republican candidates over Democratic candidates in congressional elections was underestimated in polls by an average of 4.9 percentage points in 2024, according to a report released by the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

“It is not yet clear whether this recent run of Democratic exaggerations during the presidential year signals a structural shift in polling errors – or simply reflects temporary characteristics shared across the 2016, 2020 and 2024 campaigns,” AAPOR said.

Turnout is higher in the midterms, because some voters only show up to the polls when a presidential election is underway.

In the current environment, “Republicans are pretty depressed…they’re frustrated with the war in Iran, they’re frustrated with diesel prices, they’re frustrated with the president in general,” said Sam Kay, a pollster with Republican consulting firm OnMessage.

“The question we’re all asking is: If you can’t get Republicans to take the poll, does that mean they won’t vote, and no one really knows the answer.”

A White House official denied that frustration with the president could reduce turnout. “Underestimating President Trump and this administration has proven the pundits and pollsters wrong time after time,” they said, pointing to polls that show he is still extremely popular with his Maga base.

Midterm turnout tends to decline more in rural areas as a percentage of total votes compared to presidential election years, but population centers account for a higher raw total of the total voting population.

“We know from exit polls that the decline between the Iowa presidential elections and the midterm elections favors Democrats,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Center for Political Research in Boston, “which means that more rural and suburban voters in Ohio, Iowa and Michigan tend not to vote in the midterms than those who vote in Cleveland, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan.”

But some states, like Maine, are their own animals, he added, with a habit of sending political independents and senators to Washington who frequently berate their own party.

A Suffolk University poll of Maine’s Senate race released Wednesday found Democrat Troy Jackson with just a two-point lead over Republican incumbent Susan Collins, well within the 4.4 percentage point margin of error.

“That’s the mistake others might make: They lump Maine in with Iowa, Ohio, Michigan and the dynamic is different,” Paleologos said.