With one day left before Americans decide who controls Congress, President Trump abandoned a planned weekend of rallies in Kansas and Iowa for a marathon of telephone town halls reaching nearly 20 states, while both parties confronted a problem that has nothing to do with turnout: whether this year's polls can be trusted at all.
Tuesday's election will decide all 435 House seats and 35 in the Senate. Most public surveys show Democrats leading well past the 218 seats needed for a House majority, and either tied or narrowly ahead in several Senate races Republicans once considered safe — a New York Times poll found South Carolina's Senate race tied, a state Trump carried by 18 points in 2024, while CNN surveys showed Democrats ahead in Texas, Kansas and Maine. An aggregate from the tracking firm PollCheck put Democrats ahead nationally by 8.7 points as of Oct. 27; Reuters/Ipsos had the gap at 9 points among likely voters.
A credibility problem
Those numbers come with an asterisk this year. In October, a firm calling itself Wedgewood Polling admitted it had published fabricated survey data showing Democrats with multi-point leads in battleground races — including a Mississippi Senate contest the invented numbers made look competitive. The fraud was exposed by the investigative outlet FiftyPlusOne; The New York Times subsequently dropped Wedgewood from its polling averages. The firm described the episode as an "experimental project" meant to expose vulnerabilities in the polling industry. It was the second such case this cycle: a firm called Median Strategies admitted in August to fabricating primary polling in Wisconsin's governor's race and elsewhere.
Legitimate pollsters are also still reckoning with a recent track record that has run in both directions. Trump outperformed his polling in 2016 and 2024 but underperformed it in 2020, and this year's primaries delivered their own surprises — one candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, was projected to win Michigan's Senate primary by double digits and took just 1 percent of the vote, while a 20-point leader in Wisconsin's gubernatorial primary lost by a fraction of a point.
Conservatives, especially those on the far right, are much more anti-establishment by nature. And they don't participate in anything. They hate the system. That's the challenge.
Clifford Young, president of Ipsos Public Affairs
The closing argument
Trump's campaign operation and allied super PACs, led by MAGA Inc., have pledged more than $400 million to the midterm effort, with Reuters confirming at least $226 million already spent on advertising and turnout operations through campaign filings. Rather than hold the large outdoor rallies that defined his 2024 campaign, Trump opted for a 72-hour blitz of tele-rallies, arguing it let him reach more voters across more states in the campaign's final stretch; he is also expected in Michigan, where a public rift inside the state's Democratic Party has spilled into view days before the vote.
History offers Republicans some comfort and Democrats some caution. In 18 of the last 20 midterm elections since 1946, the president's party has lost House seats, an average of 26 seats, with only Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2002 bucking the trend. Democratic presidents have fared worse historically, losing an average of 29 seats compared with 23 for Republican presidents — a pattern that would be unusually favorable for the opposition party this year, since Trump, not a Democrat, occupies the White House.
What happens next
Turnout data already points to an energized electorate: early voting has run well ahead of the last midterm in multiple states, a trend both parties are citing as evidence for their own case. Polls close across the country Tuesday evening, with the earliest results expected from East Coast Senate races by 8 p.m. ET. Control of the House, the Senate, and the final two years of Trump's agenda will turn on a map both parties now admit they cannot read with full confidence.
