I oversaw polling for Biden and Harris. Here’s how I’m reading the midterm polls.: Every October, most conversations in my personal and professional life turn to some version of: “Do you think the polls are right?” My answer is: It depends on what you mean by “right.”
I’ve run polling operations for campaigns from city council to president. In 2020 and 2024, I ran the polling and analytics programs on the Biden and Harris presidential campaigns. In each race, I used polls not so much to predict who would win, but rather to tell me how the candidate can win. Polls are often accurate in identifying what voters want, but they’re not always right about the outcome of a close election.
The president’s party almost always loses ground in a midterm. This year, that trend is amplified.
Let’s start with the narrowest version of the question: Are polls accurately capturing support for a candidate in a specific election? The most common argument I hear is that “the polls were wrong last time, so they’ll be wrong again this time.” It’s true that most public polling overestimated Democratic support in the past three presidential elections — though the misses were much smaller in 2024 than in 2016 and 2020.
In the past two midterms, however, polling was quite accurate and did not overestimate one party or the other. And in recent off-year elections like 2023 and 2025, polls actually underestimated Democrats. Could a systematic polling miss overstate Democratic support this year? Absolutely. But recent history doesn’t give us any reason to assume that will be the case.
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Joe on midterms optimism: ‘very doable’ for Dems to do well
October 26, 2026 / 06:24
One reason I trust the general direction of current polling is because it aligns with broader signals. The president’s party almost always loses ground in a midterm. This year, that trend… https://www.ms.now/opinion/midterm-election-polls-democratic-voters