DESPERATE DENIAL

Panicked Republicans Pin Everything on One Desperate Hope

Democrats lead by eight points on the generic congressional ballot.

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.

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Meanwhile, major Republican super PACs aligned with Trump and congressional GOP leadership have withdrawn funding from several House incumbents they no longer consider capable of winning re-election.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

“Republicans’ only hope in ’26 is that what happened to us in ’22 happens to Democrats in ’26,” a GOP strategist working on battleground races told Politico. “There’s a part of me that thinks there is a scenario where 2022 repeats itself. But if the polling is right… then I think it’s setting up to be one of the worst cycles in history for Republicans.”

Republicans have repeatedly benefited from polling errors over the past decade, with surveys underestimating Trump’s support in 2016, 2020 and 2024. GOP strategists argue that pollsters may once again be failing to capture the Republican electorate, particularly in closely contested Senate races.

One Republican strategist working on competitive midterm races pointed to text-message polling as a potential source of distortion. Such surveys, the strategist argued, can disproportionately attract younger, liberal and progressive respondents, particularly in heavily white states across the Great Plains.

Matt Whitlock, a GOP strategist and former senior adviser to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told Politico that pollsters still struggle to reach Republican voters who avoid phone calls or have little interest in participating in surveys.

“Part of the challenge here is polling still has not figured out how to model Republican voters who either don’t answer the phone or just aren’t really interested in polling, and so I do think that the Senate map across the board, there’s more reason to doubt the polls than you would guess by seeing how both media and Democrats are treating this,” Whitlock said.

The White House and Republican National Committee have also pushed back against the bleak forecasts, arguing that polling has consistently underestimated the strength of Trump and his political movement.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Politico “underestimating” Trump and his administration “have proven the experts and pollsters wrong every single time,” while RNC national press secretary Natalie Baldassarre dismissed Republican pessimists as “bed-wetting strategists who aren’t in the game always take the bait.”

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“Republicans are united in exposing the far-left’s extreme agenda and will leave it all on the table to defy history in November,” she said.

An RNC official likewise argued that public polling tends to favor Democrats, while acknowledging the structural challenges Republicans face in a midterm election.

“It’s not to say that the environment’s wildly different from what we anticipated it was going to be, which is a tough one in a midterm, which is what history tells you a midterm environment is going to be,” the official said. “I think generally speaking, the polls are far more pessimistic than the reality is for Republicans in the midterms.”

Even Republican polling experts concede that surveys have limitations, though they disagree on how much comfort the party should take from past mistakes.

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GOP strategist Colin Reed described the polling industry as “very much in transition” and warned that making predictions in the Trump era is a “risky gambit.”

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights, cautioned that even surveys that accurately capture the national political climate can fail to predict which states and districts will determine the outcome.

“We can get the environment right, but the map wrong,” Ruffini said. “Even if you buy this idea of a Democratic wave, a good Democratic year, a very solidly pro-Democratic environment, we should be concerned about the track record of the polls — particularly in some of these red states where there have been some pretty large misses, and especially in the Midwest.”

The political outlook for Republicans has deteriorated since Trump launched his unpopular war with Iran in February.

The war has caused energy prices to spike. AAA figures show the average price of fuel in the U.S. at $4.33 a gallon, while diesel stands at $6.31.

Meanwhile, economic pressures intensified on Wednesday, when the Labor Department reported that inflation rose faster than expected in September, largely driven by surging gasoline prices.

With the economy a top concern for voters ahead of the midterms, growing frustration over rising costs is turning even some Trump supporters against the president and his party.

In Texas, 24-year-old Brandon Tremaine, who voted for Trump in 2020, told The New York Times: “President Trump has been saying, ‘Vote as if I was on the ballot,’ and that’s exactly what I’m going to do—not vote.”

Behind closed doors, Republicans are worried. Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman who lost his competitive Florida seat during Trump’s first midterm elections in 2018, said the current political climate is particularly unforgiving.

“The environment is about as tough as one could expect,” Curbelo told Politico. “There is no one who has privately stated that they believe Republicans can hold the House—not in recent weeks, anyway.”

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