Pollsters Warn MAGA Voters Are Being Undercounted and Blue Wave is an Illusion

With less than two weeks to go before the midterm elections, a quiet debate is unfolding behind the headlines: What if the polls showing a looming Democratic tsunami are, once again, missing a slice of the Republican electorate? While most forecasts point to Democratic gains, some pollsters argue the scale of that wave may be overstated — not because Democrats lack enthusiasm, but because the methods used to measure Republican sentiment may be flawed.Pollster James Johnson, whose firm JL Partners produced one of the most accurate models of the 2024 race, believes a specific methodology may be distorting this cycle’s results: SMS-to-web polling.“I think there’s a new bogeyman on the block, which is this SMS to web polling, which is how a lot of pollsters do their work,” Mr. Johnson told The New York Sun. “It’s effectively you text someone off the voter file, you send them a link, they fill it out.”The concern, Mr. Johnson explained, isn’t that this method captures too many Democrats — it’s that it captures too many disillusioned former Trump voters, while missing quieter, loyal Republicans who are largely satisfied with the status quo.“They’re picking up too many angry ex-Trump voters,” Mr. Johnson said. “That’s a real phenomenon. We think they’re picking up too many of them at the expense of loyal Republicans who are sort of fine with how he’s doing.”Mr. Johnson pointed to an experiment his firm ran in Iowa’s Senate race as evidence. Live-call polling showed Democrats ahead by one point; online panel polling showed Democrats ahead by two — both suggesting a toss-up race. But the SMS-to-web component alone showed Democrats ahead by 12 points. “We know lots of things about Iowa,” Mr. Johnson said. “We know it’s probably not a D+12 state.”He suspects people who respond to unsolicited text surveys tend to be disproportionately motivated by frustration. “Why would you fill out that survey if you were someone who was just broadly happy with how things are going?” Mr. Johnson said, pointing to a similar dynamic the New York Times’ Siena polling unit acknowledged in 2020, when Trump voters who cursed and hung up on pollsters weren’t counted because they hadn’t completed the survey.Mr. Johnson was careful to note the limits of this effect. “I don’t think this is the difference between, you know, Democrats winning or Republicans winning,” he said.National and state polls use strikingly different methods to reach voters. Most national polls draw samples from opt-in online panels of survey takers, while another 22 percent use online panels recruited through random sampling (like Post-ABC-Ipsos polls) and 21 percent use text-to-web methods.By contrast, most state-level U.S. Senate polls use text messages (72 percent) and live interviewers (59 percent) to contact potential respondents, with 43 percent using opt-in panels. These percentages add up to more than 100 because many use multiple methods. House Speaker Mike Johnson has made the argument a centerpiece of his campaign travel this week. “I’m looking right at the camera and telling you: The polls are wrong,” he told an audience in North Carolina last week. “The polling organizations are admitting over the last few weeks that they have been under-sampling Republicans [and] they are over-sampling Democrats… because Republicans don’t trust pollsters any more.”It’s a familiar refrain, but it isn’t without basis. Republican strategist Ford O’Connell told the Financial Times that GOP voters are often simply unwilling to engage with pollsters at all. “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,” he said.Years of rhetoric from Mr. Trump casting the media — and by extension, pollsters — as adversaries have left many Republican voters disengaged from the survey process. Response rates nationwide have fallen into the low single digits, and those who do respond tend to be the most politically engaged voters, not the occasional ones who show up only when Mr. Trump’s name is on the ballot.Even some mainstream analysts are raising similar concerns. CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, pointed to a pattern of Republicans outperforming their September polling numbers in recent elections — by nine points in Iowa, six in Ohio, and five in Michigan in 2024 alone. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me four times, I just have to ask the question: could it happen again?” Mr. Enten said on CNN News Central this week.That history, however, cuts both ways. Mr. Enten also noted that Republicans outperformed their September polling in 2018 — Mr. Trump’s first midterm, when he wasn’t on the ballot — by six points in Iowa, six in Ohio, and eight in Michigan. If that trend repeats, Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan could all land in Republican hands, potentially leaving the Senate split 50-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting any tie-breaking vote.Whatever the polling methodology, Mr. Trump’s underlying numbers remain weak. His approval rating has slid to roughly 30 percent in his worst polls, with Pew Research Center finding just three in 10 Americans approve of his presidency, while 68 percent disapprove. Confidence in his handling of the economy, foreign policy, and immigration has also declined.The erosion extends into his own coalition. Pew found 67 percent of Mr. Trump’s 2024 voters now approve of his performance, down sharply from 95 percent at the start of his second term.Longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who served as political director for President Clinton, has tracked similar cracks, noting that white non-college workers — a group Mr. Trump carried by 34 points in 2024 — have soured on him, with 52 percent now disapproving of his job performance in a recent Washington Post/ABC poll.“Trump’s success depends on turning out occasional voters, whom pollsters failed to accurately capture in the turnout predictions of the last three presidential elections,” Mr. Sosnik told Politico. That dynamic may explain Mr. Trump’s travel schedule. Rather than campaigning in competitive territory, he has focused on solidly red states, including a rally this week in Kalispell, Montana. Speaker Johnson, too, says he’s visiting 40 districts across 22 states this month — many of them places “the pundits and the pollsters say we’re going to lose.”With the House majority narrow and a Fox News projection favoring Democrats in 219 of 435 districts, the 2026 midterms are widely viewed as a referendum on Trump’s presidency.Even Frank Luntz, a pollster who has been critical of Trump since 2016, offered Republicans only modest encouragement, pegging the Democrats’ turnout advantage at roughly two points — thin by historical standards. “There’s always been a historical advantage to the party out of power in the midterms, particularly in the first midterms,” Mr. Luntz told CNN.That turnout gap is where Democrats currently hold their clearest edge. A CBS News poll on the Texas Senate race found 87 percent of Democrats say they will “definitely” vote, compared to 76 percent of Republicans. NBC News found Democrats leading by 12 points among voters certain to cast a ballot, and ABC News found a similar 72-to-65 split. Democratic primary turnout has also outpaced Republicans this year in Texas, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Minnesota — all states that could determine control of Congress.

Pollsters Warn MAGA Voters Are Being Undercounted and Blue Wave is an Illusion

Pollsters Warn MAGA Voters Are Being Undercounted and Blue Wave is an Illusion

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