If The Polls Are Off By More Than 3 Points, The Republicans Will Still Control Congress

A warning from Harry Enten at CNN

Overall, the conversation at CNN is pretty much what you would expect, right now. Democrats are leading generic ballots and state polls according to the same polling firms that were off by 3 points or more in multiple previous election cycles. On that note, Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten made sure to give viewers an important caveat this week.

“What we’re dealing with if in fact the polls underestimate the Republicans is 53 Republican Senate seats compared to 47 [Democratic] seats”, Enten said, confusing the parties in his rush to get the facts out. “If the polls undershot the Republicans by greater than 3 points, well that’s all you need … for them to actually, probably hold on to the US House of Representatives.”

As I recently told premium subscribers, midterm polling has followed a consistent pattern over those election cycles in which the surveyed numbers exceed the eventual results for Democrats. The ‘delta’, the difference between expected results and actual outcome, is worse in the summer, narrows significantly in October, and somehow excludes a small, but important share of conservative in-person voters.

Early voting seems to follow a similar pattern. Right now, the most informed analysts I follow are saying Democrats have not turned out a blue wave, at least not uniformly, according to the limited set of early voting numbers that are available. Every state is a different battleground between a different set of candidates, of course. Your mileage may vary because all of politics is local. Still: the nilometer is not showing a blue flood.

If history rhymes in 2026, Democrats will not gain control of the Senate — and they will not win control of the House, either. They need an actual ‘blue wave’ to actually vote, and that has not really happened since 2006. Overall, Democrats have performed poorly in midterm elections for the last two decades.

I for one have learned to set my expectations low, like the Price is Right contestant who always bids $1. It only works when all the other contestants overvalue an item, but that does happen sometimes. Just based on the available evidence, I think Democratic hopes in 2026 are based on highly-overvalued polls that will be significantly off the final mark.

Most candidates hate “call time”, former progressive fundraiser Evan Barker tells us in her book Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. Winning elections requires a candidate to motivate the most voters to vote. Doing that requires money, therefore constant fundraising is a feature of candidacy.

Call time is “a brutal, soul-sucking process”, Barker says. She was good at it, pressed candidates relentlessly every day to commit time to it. Call time is “what candidates hate most about being a politician”, Barker says. Some veteran politicians actually sweat throughout call time, which can last 6 to 8 hours, like they are running a marathon.

It is important to note that this applies to both parties. Politicians who establish fundraising machines of their own do so in order to skip call time. Bernie Sanders is one such politician. He has raised millions with a short video asking for your support. That spared him the soul-sucking work of calling rich progressive people with a “hard ask” for a specific dollar amount.

Barker’s observations bear on two data points in this election. First is the collapse of Jewish support for Democrats in New York, again noted by Harry Enten. “Yes, they are still ahead, but we are talking about historically strong numbers for Republicans among Jewish voters, it definitely seems to me that the developments over the last few years … has had a huge impact on how Jewish voters are going to vote not just for governor, but for Congress.”

That 36 percent share of Jewish voters crossing party lines in New York also happens to include a whole lot of now-formerly-Democratic money. Jewish voters are not a large enough demographic to swing many elections on their own, but they have been a reliable purse for Democratic fundraising. Perhaps not coincidentally, the woke 1.0 Democratic Party Committee is utterly broke.

This has implications for Michigan, where prominent Jews are speaking out against Abdul El-Sayed for his friendship with Hasan Piker. Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate, highlights his opponent’s rhetoric about Israel and Iran whenever possible.

The Michigan Jewish community is older than the new Michigan Muslim community, but it is numerically smaller, so it must rely even more on political patronage. I would be interested to see the current fundraising breakdown in this community.

This also has implications for the recent absence of James Talarico from the campaign trail. That affair became quite an embarrassment after social media allegations that the candidate had been a mental health in-patient turned out to be false. Even in that affair, I set my expectations very low.

I suggested that Talarico was probably just being a ‘good progressive’ by following the new disease protocol of the left, in which a nine-day self-quarantine is a virtue signal. As I also noted last Friday, however, another reasonable explanation for that absence is that Talarico read internal polling which crushed his hopes for winning.

If internal polling on or about 28 September convinced Talarico that victory was out of reach, he may have decided to coast until Election Day. He can restrict call time to his biggest donors, do only big donor events, and use his campaign funds to do more fundraising without him — spending money to make money.

James Talarico will probably not be a United States Senator, but he can have a big pile of political cash. If he saw that the public polls are off by 3 points or more against Ken Paxton, he may have decided to focus on his political future in a party that is starved for cash.

I am not in the predictions business, nor is this Polymarket advice. I simply no longer buy into the happy polling results set before me. The evidence I follow leads me to expect November will be rather bleak compared to Democrats’ summertime hopes. To what degree is still an open question.

Historically, young voters do not turn out the way these polls expect them too, while conservative voters remember how Democrats govern, and vote accordingly.

Historically, inviting an immigrant community into your ‘big tent’ party, and adopting their agenda and rhetoric against an established community within your coalition, tends to exclude the latter in favor of the former, inspiring partisan defections.

The financial consequences of this exclusionary ‘inclusion’ can be greater than the direct consequences at the ballot box.

Historically, Democrats must lose in three successive election cycles before they give up on the unpopular positions that repel voters.

I look forward to watching Harry Enten explain the election the next day. I’m sure that James Talarico will have a bright future in the Democratic Party, whatever the outcome, but I want to see how the ‘delta’ between expectation and reality for his candidacy is explained on CNN.