In the weeks before Election Day, President Donald Trump repeatedly dismissed polls suggesting Democrats might make major gains in the midterms.
“I think they’re fake polls,” he said, adding that many were rigged. Other senior Republicans made similar claims.
At a rally in Iowa on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson argued that polls across the country were wrong because, he said, Republicans had stopped taking part in them.
Polls have sometimes undercounted Republican voters in recent years, particularly supporters of the MAGA movement. This time, however, pollsters said the bigger miss was underestimating Democratic support.
“Polls probably, on average, undercounted Democrats significantly,” said veteran Democratic pollster Chris Anderson.
Anderson said the scale of Democrats’ gains, which gave the party control of both chambers of Congress, made the election unusually difficult to predict. “You can’t model for a seismic election,” he said. “We definitely didn’t undercount Republicans, that’s for sure.”
Republican pollster Daron Shaw said the polls had generally captured the direction of the race, but may have underestimated Democrats’ share of the vote by a few points.
Before Election Day, Shaw said, polling indicated that Kansas was highly competitive and that Texas was moving toward Democrats. The shift in Texas was apparent in the data, he said, though its size came as a surprise.
David Paleologos, who directs Suffolk University’s Political Research Center, also said polls had slightly undercounted Democrats overall.
He pointed to the 2025 gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, where Democratic candidates won by wider-than-expected margins. “We were low on the margins of victory,” Paleologos said. “We were all undercounting Democrats.”
Given the longstanding argument that polls miss MAGA voters, Paleologos said the question of which party is undercounted should no longer be treated as one-sided.
