One month before the November 3 midterm elections, as a faction of MAGA elites is already organizing challenges, even violent, to the results, the major poll aggregators forecast a clear victory for the Democrats.
- Nate Silver puts the Democrats roughly nine points ahead, and about 9.6 points if only probable voters are counted.
- The aggregator Fifty PlusOne shows an almost eight-point lead with 50.8% for the Democrats versus 43.1% for the Republicans.
- This same model, which aggregates all public polls and weights them according to several criteria (reliability, characteristics of districts), assigns 99% odds that the Democrats will retake the House of Representatives.
Despite the redistricting carried out by the Republicans to gain advantages in the electoral math through the practice of gerrymandering, a lead of 3.5 points should be enough for the Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives.
- The Democrats held 214 seats in the outgoing House. The majority threshold is 218 seats out of 435, all up for election on November 3.
- The Fifty PlusOne model currently favors the Democrats in nearly 250 districts, with 7 remaining undecided.
The Senate appears more contested, partly due to the voting system.
- Of the 100 seats, only 35 are in play. The Democratic caucus controls 47 and must win four to reach a 51-seat majority, with Vice President J.D. Vance having the power to break ties in case of a 50-50 split.
- According to the Fifty PlusOne model, the Democrats have a 73% chance of obtaining the majority.
- According to G. Elliott Morris, the founder of the Fifty PlusOne model formerly at the helm of FiveThirtyEight: “If the Democrats have a 73% chance to win the Senate, it’s not because of the most contested states, but because of those where they remain outsiders.”
- North Carolina, where former Democratic governor Roy Cooper is favored, now shows a gap that exceeds the statistical error. Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and Maine are neck-and-neck, and even in Kansas the Democratic candidate is within less than half a point in the polls.
Since the end of World War II, the president’s party has lost seats in the House in 18 of the 20 midterm elections. The two exceptions are the elections of 1998 and 2002, under two extremely popular presidents, something Donald Trump is not.
- The president has reached unprecedented levels of unpopularity. Several institutes have recorded this week his lowest level in the polls, across all mandates.
- According to a survey conducted a month ago, one in five Trump supporters now regrets their vote. Latino voters, who had turned toward Trump in 2024, are returning to the Democrats, notably in Texas and Florida.
- More generally, 60% of Republicans disapprove of his governing style and its impact on the cost of living, compared with around 50% in April.
If the dynamic seems clear, a broader question remains. Are polls still reliable in the United States? In an interview published today with Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman, G. Elliott Morris urges caution.
- The way polls are conducted has evolved a lot in recent years. Polling institutes have largely abandoned telephone surveys, to which almost no one responds anymore, turning to online panels. Yet, as Morris notes, “the big problem with polls is that those who respond do not resemble those who do not respond.” Institutes adjust their samples by age or income, but they cannot determine how many voters from each camp should be represented.
- Considered in isolation, no single poll captures a political dynamic. That is why major models compare polls to actual vote results. This year, Democratic primaries drew far more voters than Republican ones, a gap far more favorable than in 2022.
- By comparing the observed balance in the 2026 primaries to the historical relationship between primary participation and the House popular vote, Daniel Donner estimates that this indicator would correspond to a Democratic lead of about 13 points in November, i.e., a margin above the 8 points indicated by polls and one of the worst defeats in the history of the Republican Party.