| By Henry Olsen, senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center Recent Senate polls must have Democrats feeling giddy. Democrats are now leading in the RealClearPolitics polling average in every battleground race except Iowa, and even there, the three most recent polls have their candidate, Josh Turek, in front or tied. Polls also show Democrats or Democratic-backed independents tied or ahead in Nebraska and within a few points even in deep-red Kansas and South Dakota. Too good to be true? Well, probably. But there unquestionably are serious warning signs for the GOP. Let’s do a deep dive. Modern polling is more art than science. As data journalist G. Elliott Morris points out, all polls are models now. Since so few people answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize, polling samples are no longer representative of the full voting population. That forces pollsters to estimate what the electorate will look like and assign weights to fit their data into the model. The problem with this is obvious: Those estimates are often off, and in close races that can matter a lot. YouGov, for example, is a well-regarded pollster, but it systematically overestimated the share of Democrats in the 2024 electorate, causing it to predict that Kamala Harris would win the popular vote by three percentage points and putting her ahead in five of the seven swing states. She famously did not do either of those things. Because of this, analysts and reporters should carefully check a pollster’s assumptions when they assess a poll. Unfortunately, virtually no one does this. The recent scandal involving a fake polling firm, Median Strategies, receiving coverage for a purported survey that it later admitted was fabricated is an extreme example of what can go wrong. There’s no evidence that any of the Senate polls driving media coverage are fake. But it’s still a problem that many of those polls don’t release complete cross tabulations showing results for demographic subgroups or explain what the overall demographic makeup of the poll is. That makes it difficult to assess the expectations behind a pollster’s model. Some that do show their work should raise eyebrows. The Abacus Data poll in Maine, for example, showed Sen. Susan Collins (R) ahead by one percentage point among all surveyed voters. But the pollster touted its finding among so-called likely voters, which had Democrat Troy Jackson up by nine points. That massive swing could easily be the result of an overestimation of the Democratic turnout edge. Similarly, YouGov’s unweighted respondent pool is heavily Democratic in some states. Its Maine poll shows Harris voters outnumbering Trump ones by 22 percentage points, but Harris only won the state by seven points. Its Iowa poll shows Harris voters outnumbering Trump voters by eight points in a state that Trump won by 13. Weighting the responses to match the actual results is intended to address that, but it’s reasonable to ask whether such a big oversampling of Harris voters means it’s missing a key element of Republican support. Other polls sidestep these questions by failing to release sufficient cross-tabulation data at all. Eight polls were released on the hotly contested Michigan Senate race in the past month, but many of those did not include full comprehensive cross tabulations in their reports. Without cross tabs, we don’t know how the pollsters are modeling the electorate. So can Republicans carry on in confidence that election night will go better than the “skewed” polls suggest? Not so fast. Those surveys that do release detailed cross tabulations establish some trends that should worry, if not frighten, the GOP. First, virtually every poll shows that Democrats are much more united behind their candidates than Republicans are. That’s to be expected where the GOP candidate — looking at you, Ken Paxton — is controversial. Five recent polls of the Texas Senate race that include cross tabulations by party put the scandal-plagued state attorney general’s support among Republicans at 84 percent on average, while James Talarico, his Democratic opponent, enjoys 93 percent support from Democrats. The same pattern appears in Ohio, where polls show Sen. Jon Husted winning only an average of 84 percent of Republicans while former senator Sherrod Brown has 95 percent of Democrats. Most polls releasing cross tabulations also show independents voting for the Democrat by large margins. The Texas polls show Talarico winning more than 50 percent of these voters, on average, while the two Ohio polls show Brown winning either 56 percent or 66 percent of them. Turek is leading among independents in each of the Iowa polls that have data for this demographic, as is Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. It’s hard to win races even in deep-red states when you’re losing independents by large margins, especially if some of your partisan support is slipping away. The polls also show a smaller number of Republicans in the overall electorate than in 2024. Some of that should be expected, as the backers of the party that does not control the White House tend to be more enthusiastic about voting in midterm elections. But these data are also reflected in general partisan-identification surveys since the last election, which show fewer people saying they are Republican and more saying they are Democratic. Registration data in competitive states such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina has also swung against the GOP. The overall picture that emerges is a bit murky, it’s true, but it’s not a good one for Republicans. They have seven weeks to reengage their core supporters and recoup some support among independents. If they can do that — raising GOP support in key races to 90 percent or more while winning close to 40 percent of the independent vote — the strongly Republican character of most of these states should allow the party to narrowly retain Senate control. Miss on either target, however, and the turgid waters become crystal clear — and deeply blue — come November. Poll watchPresidential job approval is a key signal ahead of the midterms. But overall job approval doesn’t tell the whole story, and many aggregators wind up overestimating Trump’s political weakness. Margin of Victory is tracking a better indicator: approval among registered and likely voters. The president's bump last week turned out to be a blip. | 
