Last week, I tried to show why the polls are not telling the whole story of the midterm election. In essence, it comes down to the difference between "data-driven," or quantitative, polls and qualitative polls that measure a broader range of voter information.
As usual, scrambling the results is Donald Trump's outsized personality and bombast. How much will Trump affect the outcome? No one can say, certainly not pollsters. So, analysis becomes a crapshoot, with both sides trotting out "experts" who may or may not be putting their thumbs on the scale to create an outcome suited to their constituencies.
A qualitative poll attempts to weight for political engagement, voter registration history, and geographic density to avoid over-representing hyper-passionate partisans. This is "modeling beyond demographics." It may sound like guesswork, but statistics can be read and interpreted.
"VoteHub analyst Zachary Donnini noted that while quantitative forecasts — relying on data — mostly show Democrats gaining over 20 House seats this November, ratings from the qualitative forecasters — measuring a broader range of voter information — are less bullish," writes UnHerd's Michael Baharaeen. "Among the latter, two show Republicans slated for a small net gain in House seats. Just one projects Democrats to make net gains, with a mere four-seat gain."
This does not make the data-driven polls wrong. It just means that pollsters are reading different sorts of information and running it through their models and coming up with different results.
The chasm between the data-heavy models and the qualitative experts likely hinges on how much weight each gives the polls right now. If the polling is basically accurate — as it has been in recent midterm cycles — Democrats are slated for an extremely successful election. If not, the party could still have a decent election, but it may strike out in races in more conservative places and fail to flip the Senate. So to understand their chances, it’s worth considering factors other than the polls asking which party voters prefer in November.
There are clear grounds for believing this will be a good midterm for Democrats. Start with the fact that history is on their side: with vanishingly few exceptions, the party out of power almost always makes gains. In every midterm since 2002, the “out-party” has flipped at least one house of Congress. While Democrats’ changing coalition has made it harder for them to win in presidential years, it performs very well in lower-turnout elections comprising more highly engaged voters.
It's become impossible to accurately gauge voter sentiment in a telephone or online poll. Too many people refuse to take calls from unknown numbers and online polls are little better than "push" polls. Because of that, polling "samples, from which pollsters draw their raw data, are hopelessly inadequate to measure the electorate.
So pollsters now rely almost exclusively on models. The models project statistical outcomes based on the "weight" given to various metrics like turnout, history, and partisan lean.
Since the 2016 election, pollsters have refined these models until they have become reasonable facsimiles of "accurate." Mostly.
Some polls show Democratic strength in places whose baseline partisanship is strongly Republican. For example, multiple polls have shown Florida Democrats are either competitive or even leading in races for governor, which is an office they haven’t won since 1994, and the Senate — where a democratic socialist is running. Two polls have also shown a competitive Senate race in Arkansas, which voted for Trump by over 30 points in 2024 and which hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2008.
"It’s possible Republicans really are in such trouble that even deep-red states are on the table," writes Baharaeen. "But results like this call to mind the 2018 midterms, when Democrats faced a similarly favorable environment, and polling showed them competitive or even ahead in several states Trump had won big."
He adds, "On election day, however, they lost all of them."
Republicans will almost certainly lose the House, since Democrats need only 3-4 seats for nominal control of the lower body. But the Senate is another story. Everything would have to break right for the Democrats to take control of the upper chamber, and I don't think that's going to happen.