The Final Polls Show a Blue Surge. Can We Trust Them?
New Times/Siena surveys show Democrats leading in all the key battlegrounds that will decide Senate control.
Democrats gained ground right to the end in the final New York Times/Siena University polls of the 2026 midterm campaign. The party is ahead in all seven states likeliest to decide control of the Senate: Michigan, Kansas, Texas, Maine, Ohio and, more narrowly, Alaska and Iowa.
A substantial Democratic lead in Texas? Kansas? Anything like these results would have been unfathomable just a few months ago.
In today’s polarized era, there’s no precedent for a party to fare this well in so many states that are generally safe wins for the other side. The only plausible comparisons are the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, but the recent polls outpace even those. The average of all polls shows Democrats leading in the same states as the Times/Siena surveys, giving the party the edge in more solidly Republican Senate seats than it managed to flip in 2006 and 2008 combined.
On the other hand, there’s precedent in the Trump era for polls to overestimate Democrats, and it’s reasonable to wonder whether the polls might be overestimating Democratic strength yet again. This is a real possibility. President Trump’s supporters are relatively unlikely to respond to polls, which introduces the ever-present risk of a polling misfire. And as will be discussed at the end of this newsletter, there are signs that this is a serious problem for pollsters again this cycle.
Nonetheless, Democrats lead by enough that they could win the Senate even if the polls underestimate Republicans by as much as they did in 2016 or 2020. And if there were ever a time when American voters might offer such a decisive verdict on the president, this could be it.
...
For the first time, a significant number of Republican-leaning voters disapprove of his job performance. He’s much less popular than he was ahead of previous Trump-era elections, including those when Republicans were clobbered.
...
With Democrats again needing to win reliably red states to take the Senate, it’s absolutely possible that Democrats will be disappointed once more. To keep those Senate seats, Republicans merely need to get Republican-leaning voters to show up and vote Republican, as they usually do. It wouldn’t be a shock if that happens. This is still Texas and Kansas we’re talking about.
But this seemingly simple task is much more challenging for Republicans today than it was in 2018. Back then, Republicans could win merely by holding voters who supported Mr. Trump. His approval rating was over 50 percent in all of the crucial red states where Democrats fell short. This time, they won’t have that essential advantage. His approval rating is under 40 percent across the five red states included in this poll (Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Alaska and Iowa).
The president’s unpopularity may simply make it impossible for Republicans to compete in blue or purple states. The latest polls show Democrats making their largest gains in Maine and Michigan, where both Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Troy Jackson now hold meaningful leads.
...
Texas and Kansas
At the beginning of the year, Texas and Kansas didn’t figure prominently in Democrats’ path to control of the Senate. They haven’t won a Senate seat there in a generation (or three).
Now Texas and Kansas look like two of the Democratic Party’s best red-state opportunities. That’s true not only in Times/Siena polls, but also in the average of other recent polls.
A core problem for Republicans: Ken Paxton in Texas and Senator Roger Marshall in Kansas are two of the party’s weakest candidates of the cycle. They’re the least popular candidates tested in these polls, and their favorability ratings have fallen since the last Times/Siena polls in September, despite tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spending on their behalf.
Just 33 percent of Texas voters say they have a favorable view of Mr. Paxton — who has faced investigation, indictment and impeachment — and 54 percent have an unfavorable view.
The ratings for Mr. Marshall, a former practicing physician, aren’t much better, with 39 percent favorable and 50 percent unfavorable. He has faced a deluge of criticism after a New York Times report that he sued hundreds of patients over minor medical debt. And he hasn’t helped himself with a string of missteps on the campaign trail, like saying, “This is one of the best economies I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”
These favorability numbers are poor in any circumstances, but they’re especially bad for Republicans in a red state. Senator Ted Cruz almost lost to Beto O’Rourke in 2018, but Texans had a favorable view of Mr. Cruz and approved of Mr. Trump’s performance. With neither condition in place, why wouldn’t Democrats get over the top this time?
In contrast, Democrats have put forward two of their strongest candidates of the cycle in James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. They have wide appeal and both lean into their religious training. Mr. Hamilton is senior pastor of America’s largest United Methodist congregation; Mr. Talarico is a seminarian. They boast among the highest favorability ratings of any candidate in our polls.
Of the red states in the poll, Kansas is the only one that has made a meaningful shift toward the Democrats over the last month. Mr. Hamilton has become much better known, with the share of voters without an opinion of him falling to 6 percent from 36 percent. As more voters have gotten to know him (and Mr. Marshall), he’s pulled into a clear lead.
Republicans in Texas have an additional problem: crumbling support among Hispanic voters.
The poll finds Mr. Talarico with a 38-point lead among this group, 65-27, an enormous swing from 2024, when Hispanic voters were evenly split in the presidential race, according to Times Voter Trends. This kind of swing would be enough to turn Texas into a tossup even if Mr. Paxton weren’t such a flawed candidate. Indeed, the poll finds Republican candidates ahead by less than one point across the state’s U.S. House races while the Democrat Gina Hinojosa leads by one point for governor.
Maine and Michigan
Democrats made their largest gains since September in Maine and Michigan, the only two blue or purple states among the core Senate battlegrounds.
Together with the result of our last Minnesota poll, the Democratic surge in these purple-to-blue states suggests that the national political environment is simply too inhospitable for Republican candidates trying to compete for the support of Democratic-leaning voters, even when they may have relatively favorable candidate matchups.
...in Michigan, where Dr. El-Sayed now holds a double-digit lead. Unlike in Maine or Minnesota, this is not a state where Republicans have a clear candidate quality advantage. The Republican Mike Rogers’s favorability rating is negative; Dr. El-Sayed’s numbers are positive.
The Michigan results follow a string of recent polls showing Dr. El-Sayed making steady gains over the last month, as he consolidates the support of Democratic-leaning voters who started out skeptical of his candidacy. His lead now matches his party’s across the state’s U.S. House races; in September, he underperformed Democrats on the generic ballot by six points.
The poll was taken almost entirely before Haley Stevens, Dr. El-Sayed’s Democratic primary opponent, made a stunning 11th-hour endorsement of Mr. Rogers. The poll showed almost no sign of remaining dissent in the Democratic ranks. Dr. El-Sayed held a 96-2 lead among voters who said they voted for Ms. Harris, up from 91-5 in September.
Black voters, who offered tepid support to Dr. El-Sayed in September, now back him, 93-4. Mr. Rogers did not receive the support of any respondent in the city of Detroit (among 43 people).
Voters over age 65 have also swung toward Dr. El-Sayed...
Ohio, Iowa and Alaska
At the beginning of this election cycle, these three states seemed like the Democratic Party’s best opportunities.
Ohio still looks like a plausible part of the Democratic Party’s path of least resistance to the Senate, with Sherrod Brown leading by five points. But at least in these polls, Iowa and Alaska seem less favorable toward Democrats.
Unlike in Kansas or Texas, Republicans have put forward conventional, scandal-free candidates in those two states. They’re not necessarily popular, to be clear. Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa is the most popular Republican of any tested in the polls, but voters were split on whether they had a favorable or unfavorable view of her, 43-43. Nonetheless, even she trails narrowly in the poll. Her opponent, Josh Turek, is viewed more favorably than any candidate of either party across these seven surveys.
Mary Peltola was the only Democrat to lose ground since September in Times/Siena polling. The Alaska poll was almost entirely completed before The Times reported that operatives aligned with the Peltola campaign had orchestrated an effort to place another Dan Sullivan on the ballot to siphon votes from Senator Dan Sullivan. ...
Are the polls off?
Over the history of the Times/Siena poll, there have been two previous elections when the final polls showed everything seeming to break toward Democrats.The first was in 2018. Our final polls showed Democrats gaining across the board, including in races that had barely been on the radar. Democrats surged by double digits in just a few weeks to build startling leads over longtime Republican incumbents in districts that supported Mr. Trump in the previous election. Democrats even led in Georgia’s Sixth, which had badly disappointed them in a special election one year earlier when Jon Ossoff lost.
In the end, the final Times/Siena polls were dead-on — including where Democratic strength was most surprising.
The second time was in 2020. Joe Biden steadily gained in our polls in October, as Mr. Trump’s poor debate performance and subsequent Covid hospitalization reignited the possibility of a landslide win.
In the end, the final Times/Siena polls in 2020 underestimated Mr. Trump by five points (Mr. Biden won, but by much less than our polls suggested).
This cycle, Democrats are once again responding to Times/Siena polls at a much higher rate than Republicans. Across these final battleground polls, registered white Democrats were about 30 percent likelier to take the poll than registered white Republicans. That’s actually a bit higher than in the final polls in 2020.
In recent days, there have also been warnings from other pollsters. The Washington Post released the result of a poll finding Mr. Hamilton up around 10 points in Kansas, but the pollsters did not trust the result. Registered Democrats were more than three times as likely to cooperate with the survey as registered Republicans (though it is worth noting The Post did not observe a similar problem in earlier polls of Maine and Michigan).
The persistence of this kind of nonresponse bias introduces the risk of a systematic polling error like those in 2016 or 2020. That said, nonresponse bias doesn’t make a systematic polling error inevitable. Our 2022 final polls were on the money even as white Democrats were 28 percent likelier to respond than white Republicans. Similarly, our accurate 2018 polls had a much higher response from Democrats.
There are two factors that help explain why it’s possible for the polls to be right, even when Mr. Trump’s supporters are less likely to respond.
One is turnout. There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that Mr. Trump’s supporters aren’t just less likely to respond to surveys, but also less likely to vote in midterm elections. This would help explain the basic pattern of polling error during the Trump era: Polls have a pretty good record in midterms but not in presidential elections.
The second factor is a technique called “weighting,” in which pollsters make statistical adjustments to give more weight to voters from groups underrepresented in the survey responses. This gives pollsters a chance to produce reasonable results, simply by giving more weight to registered Republicans, self-identified Republicans or the voters who say they voted for Mr. Trump who did respond to the survey.Weighting is not a panacea. That’s because nonresponse bias can run much deeper than what can be observed and corrected in the data. A poll might be weighted to have the right number of Trump supporters but still have the wrong kind of Trump supporters — and particularly the kind of Trump supporter who might be voting Democratic.
Imagine, for instance, if the Trump voters who responded to a pollster were likelier to be the kind who supported Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. A pollster might then have too many of the kinds of Trump supporters who would readily defect to Democrats. The Post believed it had this kind of issue in Kansas: Even after weighting, the results still seemed too good for Democrats.
...in today’s Times/Siena polls. This summer, we adopted a new set of weighting techniques to improve our polling. When we re-evaluated our 2024 polls with this new weighting approach, we saw that our polls would have been about 1.6 points better on average. The difference felt meaningful, but it was fundamentally modest.
This time? Well, look for yourself. Here’s what our final polls this year would show if we had used the weighting from prior cycles:
- Michigan: D+16 (today’s actual published result is D+11) [Bullshit]
- Alaska: D+6 (actual D+2)
- Iowa: D+4 (actual D+1)
- Kansas: D+10 (actual D+5) [Bullshit]
- Maine: D+5 (actual D+6)
- Ohio: D+11 (actual D+5) [Bullshit]
- Texas: D+9 (actual D+7) [Total fucking bullshit and horsecrap]
On average, that’s a difference of more than three points.
[Okay, well I'm glad your weighting this summer.]
[No, Dems are ahead in all SEVEN of the potential flippers. I would rather have Dem. support underestimated when reigning in Trump is at stake.]...
Maybe it implies that we’ve adopted weighting techniques that can handle the problems that caused the Times/Siena poll to overestimate Democratic strength in the past, especially in white working-class states. If so, maybe we’re dead-on.
Or perhaps one could argue that the Times/Siena polls will underestimate Democrats. Our polls were accurate in 2018 and 2022, after all, so maybe one should trust the old approach in a midterm election. If so, maybe the Democrats will do even better than our polls suggest.
Or maybe the extraordinarily blue results on our old methodology and the increased effect of weighting suggest that nonresponse bias is worse than ever. If so, polls could seriously underestimate Republicans once again. There’s no reason to assume that 2016 or 2020 is the worst case scenario.
[That aside (how was the theater Mrs. Lincoln), there is no fact-based reason to raise thenpossibility that your 2026 polling may still "seriously underestimate" R's as it did in 2016 and 2020--presidential years, after all. You ran your summer 2026 weighting against your 2024 presidential polling and the results and you improved "meaningfully". The key comparison it seems to me (besides to the Michigan primary) is to other mid-term years, 2018 and 2022 and your polling using the original weighting was accurate.]
