Panicked Republicans Pin Everything on One Desperate Hope

ERIC BARADAT / AFP via Getty Images Republicans are clinging to a familiar explanation for their party’s worsening political fortunes: the polls must be wrong.

The numbers offer little comfort for the GOP.

Democrats hold an eight-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot, according to the RealClearPolling average , pointing to the possibility of substantial Democratic gains in November.

The lead is slightly larger than the one Democrats held at the same stage in 2018, when they rode a blue wave to a 41-seat gain in the House of Representatives.

This time, the danger extends beyond traditionally competitive districts.

Republican-held seats in Texas, Ohio, Maine, Iowa, North Carolina and Nevada are increasingly vulnerable, as is a Kentucky district Donald Trump won by 15 points.

Meanwhile, major Republican super PACs aligned with Trump and congressional GOP leadership have withdrawn funding from several House incumbents they no longer consider capable of winning re-election.

Faced with mounting evidence of a difficult election cycle, Republicans are placing their hopes on the possibility that polling errors will once again rescue them.

“Polling is getting much more difficult to do,” veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove told Politico.

He added that if the surveys are overstating Democratic support, “then every one of these races that we’re talking about today—Texas, Michigan, Maine, Alaska, Iowa—they’re all within the margin of error.” Republicans have recent history to support their argument.

In 2022, pre-election forecasts widely anticipated heavy Democratic losses.

Instead, Democrats performed better than expected, retained control of the Senate and limited their losses in the House.

Trump, too, outperformed final polling averages in all seven swing states in 2024, after confounding national polling predictions in 2016.

For some Republicans, those precedents represent their best remaining chance of avoiding a disastrous November.