How the Polls Could Be Wrong Again

Less than a month out from Election Day, the polls are predicting a Democratic rout.

According to the election forecaster Nate Silver’s polling average , Democratic Senate candidates are leading in Kansas, which voted for Donald Trump by 16 percentage points in 2024, as well as Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas, all of which Trump won by more than 10 points.

In the House, Democrats are poised to win their largest majority in 18 years.

So the polls tell us.

Can they be believed? Ever since underestimating Trump in 2016, pollsters have been busy trying to regain the public’s trust, tweaking their methodologies in ways both dramatic and subtle.

Perhaps they’ve finally got it right.

They seem to think so.

“I’m confident that not just ourselves, but the industry, has good technique, good methodology, and that they are reflecting and representing public opinion,” Spencer Kimball, the director of polling at Emerson College, told me.

But the industry has been confident before, only to be proved wrong.

After 2016, pollsters concluded that they had failed to pay enough attention to educational polarization, the somewhat-new phenomenon of college-educated voters having political preferences that were sharply different from those of voters without a degree.

Going forward, the industry would try to include more non-college-educated voters in surveys or, if that proved impossible, would weight those voters’ responses to align with their share of the electorate.

In 2018, the pollsters nailed the midterms with little error, suggesting that their adaptations had paid off.

Then came 2020.

Although the polls correctly gauged that most people preferred Joe Biden to Trump, they underestimated Trump’s support by even more than they did in 2016, especially at the state level.