Democrats are acting as if Senate control is within their grasp, but John McLaughlin, a longtime pollster for President Donald Trump, says the surveys feeding that confidence are badly skewed.
With less than two weeks until Election Day, McLaughlin warned that the 2026 midterms are extremely close, and that some polls appear to deliberately shortchange Republicans by shrinking their share of the sample. Appearing Friday on Just the News, No Noise, he pointed to a New York poll in which just 22% of respondents were Republican. In the state's last gubernatorial race, Republicans made up 30% of the people who actually voted.
That's an eight-point hole for the GOP before a single question gets asked.
Asked how that happens, McLaughlin pointed the finger at the press.
"I think it's deliberate because a lot of the media that covers those polls has a bias," McLaughlin said.
He also had a word for the gatekeepers who decide which polls get treated as gospel and which get dismissed.
"Sometimes they don't put the liberal pollsters through the same kind of scrutiny," he added.
The consequences reach well beyond cable news narratives, too. "It affects donors," McLaughlin explained. A Republican donor who keeps hearing that a race is slipping away has every reason to hold onto his checkbook, and a self-fulfilling prophecy is a lot cheaper for Democrats than an actual campaign.
ICYMI: Still Think Talarico Will Flip Texas? You Might Want to Read This.
We've seen Republican support underestimated before, and McLaughlin walked through the track record. "Remember when there was a Hillary lock in 2016," he said. "Remember when there was going to be a [Joe] Biden blue wave in 2020, and remember [former] Vice President Kamala Harris at this point in time in 2024."
He sees the same pattern repeating now.
"So there's been, you know, a lot of bad calls, bad polling, and it seems like they're doubling down on the bad polls in this election cycle because when you get into the internals of the polls, they just don't make sense," McLaughlin continued. "They don't match up with the electorate, what they're going to look like in a midterm election."
Texas offers a perfect example.
In 2024, multiple polls showed Trump with a mere four-point lead over Kamala Harris in Texas. Trump ultimately won the state by 14 points. McLaughlin suggested the same thing could be happening in the Texas Senate race, where some polls show Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D-50th District) beating Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.
I, for one, am not buying the Texas flip narrative.
Talarico's polling lead deserves attention, but Texas is a Republican state, and even MS NOW’s Katy Tur is skeptical of the polls saying Talarico is ahead.
Even CNN's Harry Enten has admitted that polling averages in close Senate races have historically missed the final result by an average of 3.7 points, and since 2016, those misses have mostly favored Republicans. A GOP over-performance of that size would deliver a 52-48 Republican majority.
So who exactly are the polls missing? Pollster Frank Luntz says Republican voters are simply less willing to sit through surveys. If those voters keep hanging up on pollsters and then show up on Election Day anyway, the results could look very different from what the media is promising.
But let’s be clear: McLaughlin isn't predicting a cakewalk for either side.
"I've never seen it so close," he said. "There are eight Senate races that are toss-ups. [In] the House, there's over 70 seats in play. There's 17, at least pure toss-ups. So it really is a toss-up election."
In the end, all we know is that polls are snapshots built on assumptions, and those assumptions often turn out to be wrong. Republicans who tune out the doom and simply show up have the power to make them wrong again.