House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is telling Republicans not to trust the polls heading into Tuesday’s midterm elections, arguing that GOP voters are refusing to take part in surveys.
“I’m telling you these polls are off, all of them, because they’re using faulty analysis,” Johnson said on Fox News on Oct. 25, USA Today reported. “Republicans are no longer responding to polls,” he said, adding that when he asks crowds of about 300 people who has answered a poll in the past six months, “there will be like three hands.”
In a later Fox News appearance, Johnson said the polls are “even further off this time because more and more Republicans are unwilling to participate in these surveys,” according to The Times-Picayune | The Advocate. “They don’t want to give their information to someone on the phone,” he said.
National surveys currently show Democrats ahead. The latest NBC News poll found Democrats leading by 7 points nationally: 52% of registered voters prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, compared with 45% who prefer Republican control.
What past polling misses show
Polls have underestimated Republicans in recent presidential years. A task force of the American Association for Public Opinion Research found that “for the third straight presidential cycle, pre-election polls underestimated Republican vote shares.” Polls overstated Democratic margins by an average of 2.7 points in 2024, 4.6 points in 2020 and 3.1 points in 2016, according to the AAPOR report.
Midterms have been different. The same report found that polls “overestimated Republicans by only 0.6 points in 2022 and Democrats by only 0.1 points in 2018.” In other words, the last midterm polls did not underestimate the GOP.
The task force also found that over the long run, “Democrats and Republicans have each been underestimated about equally often since the dawn of modern polling in the 1930s.”
Against the odds at the time, Johnson correctly predicted that Republicans would win control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2024, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate noted. Voters will settle the question on Tuesday.
