Midterm preview: Can the polls be trusted in a midterm this close?

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Friday, October 30, 2026

With Election Day just days away, control of the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance. Washington Times political reporters Susan Ferrechio and Seth McLaughlin break down the latest polling, the tightest battleground races, and why Republicans still have a path to victory despite Democratic momentum. They also examine President Trump’s influence over the election and whether his loyal supporters could help Republicans keep the Senate red.

With early voting already underway, and Election Day just days away, control of the U.S. Senate could come down to a handful of razor-thin races. Democrats are hoping to flip the chamber, but with the margins this tight, Even a small polling error could mean the results look very different from the predictions.

[FERRECHIO] 50-50, I would say. It really is. It’s 50-50. Some people say, oh no, it looks like Democrats are going to get it. But I don’t necessarily believe that. I think it’s really up in the air at this point.

And despite signs of Democratic momentum, Republicans still have a path to keeping the Senate red.

[MCLAUGHLIN] There are people who look at MAGA voters and say, how can you support Trump when he’s making you pay more for everything? And I think Trump voters would say, well, we still believe in him and we want to give him more time to follow through on what he’s trying to do.

So are Republicans really headed for defeat? Or is the race for the Senate still anyone’s to win?

[FERRECHIO] A lot of the political analyses have suggested the House is going to flip from Republican to Democratic control. The Senate is more of a wild card. The polls show in many cases that Democrats will have slight leads in some battleground polls, but it’s within the margin of error. And what that means is it’s possible that the sample sizes are small enough that it could flip in the other direction. So in Maine, for example, maybe Troy Jackson is leading by a couple of points in one poll. But the margin of error is about three or four points, which means they could be off by that amount. And maybe Susan Collins is leading by two points. That’s what makes the polling in the Senate suggestive of a real coin toss on election night.

[MCLAUGHLIN] There’s been mounting skepticism of the ability to gauge the electorate since basically 2016. In 2016, we saw going into election night, a lot of people thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. And guess what? No, that’s not what happened. Polls were proven wrong, and Trump won.

Since then, society’s changed a lot. Fewer people have phone lines, fewer people are picking up. Even if they know a pollster’s coming, maybe they don’t want to talk to a pollster, right? And, you know, that’s why everyone waits for Election Day. And, you know, the broader thing here is, like, journalists, political strategists, candidates, we all kind of rely on polls still. Because elections are so amorphous, the country politically is so amorphous that you’re trying to find some sort of narrative and try, in an honest way, to try to relay to folks what is going on. And, you know, on Tuesday night or whenever we get the final results, there are going to be people talking about polls one way or the other.

With control of the Senate hanging in the balance, a handful of battleground states have become the focus of national attention. And as Election Day approaches, candidates are sharpening their attacks, looking for any advantage in races that could be decided by the slimmest of margins.

[MCLAUGHLIN] You look across the map, it’s super tight everywhere. Alaska and Iowa, according to the polls, dead heat. Kansas, Democrats, up three points. Ohio, Sherrod Brown, he’s up three points over Senator John Husted. And then we go to Texas, James Talarico. He’s up by two points. Maine, Troy Jackson has a slight lead over Senator Susan Collins. There’s all these crosswinds here and there. And, you know, it just it makes for a really interesting election night dynamic.

[FERRECHIO] Maine is a really interesting case because Susan Collins has been there for five terms and she’s very popular. And one of the reasons she’s able to hang on up there is she’s a proud moderate. And what she promotes is how she gets things done, which is very hard to get anything done in Congress. And she was able to talk about, look what all the things I’ve got done for Maine. He can’t say that. So he’ll say, well, I’m going to do this and this. And she’ll say, well, you actually can’t do that because of the Senate rule. Everything you’re talking about, you would never be able to do. And I think that that has come across really well in the debates.

You know, I went to Auburn, Maine. This is where you can really see how the rest of Maine might go in terms of how the voters feel. And it was funny. I talked to so many people there and half were voting for her and half were not. You know, some said, yes, she’s brought jobs and they trust her. And then the rest were like, I can’t pay my rent. What has she done for me lately? So you really felt the divide there.

[MCLAUGHLIN] One of the marquee Senate races is the contest of Michigan between former Rep. Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul Al-Sayed. And Abdul Al-Sayed has had a narrow lead, it seems, for weeks on end here.

When I was left in Michigan a few weeks ago, you could see the potential for the sentiment to change or the hope that Republicans could make the sentiment change. by trying to play up this idea that he’s a terrorist sympathizer. The way they’ve directly linked it to El-Sayed is some things from his family’s past, where they dug up from old tweets from his half-sister, who said that his mother was part of the Muslim Brotherhood when they lived in Egypt, which is a group that has been around, which wants to, in a broad sense, establish Sharia law across society. And it also has led to some offshoot of extremist groups. Republicans have grabbed onto that and basically said, Abdul needs to answer to this. And, you know, he in turn says he has no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But nonetheless, you know, Republicans have been hammering this home.

Trump was in Michigan the other day and he was saying if Abdul gets elected, that basically the country is going to be swamped with jihadists. And, you know, this stuff resonates.

“I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States Senator. We’re not going to let that happen.” - President Trump

President Trump’s influence over the Republican Party remains enormous. But after a turbulent year in the White House, just how deep does his supporters’ loyalty run?

[FERRECHIO] We all know that this election is in many ways about Trump. If you elect Democrats, well, what does that mean? You put the brakes on the Trump administration because they no longer have complete control of government. Say the Democrats win the Senate alone. They won’t even take up these GOP bills. It’s a DOA. So Trump is pretty much stymied the last two years of his presidency.

[MCLAUGHLIN] Trump has high disapproval rating right now. He obviously is struggling with independents, and Democrats think he’s a crazy person. But Trump is going to energize the base, right? A few years ago, Trump had a famous saying that he could walk down Fifth Avenue in New York and shoot someone, and, you know, his people would still be behind him. And, you know, there is evidence of that, right? Where there’s a level of forgiveness when it comes to your guy or the person that you really believe in. And Trump has figured out a way to prompt these people to give him a lot of slack.

What that number is, you know, we’ll learn on Election Day. But there’s also, you know, a bet. There’s a bet here that the polls cannot accurately gauge the support in rural parts of the state, like we were talking about before. And Trump can perhaps connect with them better than you could arguably say anyone else in American politics, or at least that’s what he’s shown over the last 10 years or so.

For Republicans, the hope is that Trump’s support runs deeper than the polls suggest. Whether that’s enough to keep the Senate red is a question only Election Day can answer.