Can We Actually Trust the Midterm Polls?

Peter Hamby (0:05)

Welcome, everyone, to The Making of a President, my new podcast for Puck about how to win elections and how campaigns really work in the modern era, as we head into the 2028 presidential race. My guest today is elections analyst Lakshya Jain, who runs Political Data at The Argument and is the founder of Split Ticket, one of the smartest election analysis websites in the game. And he's here to help me answer a thorny question, is polling broken? As we head into the final weeks of the midterms and the presidential race after that, it sure seems like it. It's almost impossible for pollsters these days to get people to pick up their phones to respond to surveys. Only about 1-2% of voters actually answer cold calls on their cell phones. It means that creating high quality polls is really hard and really expensive for media organizations and universities, so we're left with way fewer good polls out there to help us make sense of campaigns. All of that has left a void for partisans and issue advocacy groups to flood social media with cheap, low quality polling that serves their own agendas, with shoddy methods and biased language all designed to skew polling averages and news coverage. And even good polls have been really off in recent cycles, including this year in primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin. On top of all that, the polling industry is full of inscrutable jargon, models, weighting, sample sizes, that a lot of people, including journalists, don't really understand. I've known Lakshya for years. He's super smart, a Berkeley software engineer by training, and he talks about polling and data in a way that we can all comprehend.

Let's get into it.

Welcome everybody to the making of a president. My guest today, Lakshya Jain, one of the smartest people I know, analyzing polls, data, elections. And like most people in politics these days, we met on Twitter in the DMs, started to vibe. We're pals. You know what you're talking about, man. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing?

Lakshya Jain (2:12)

Thanks for having me, Peter. I got to say, this is a cycle that keeps surprising me. So when people ask me how I'm doing, the only response I can give is shocked.

Peter Hamby (2:23)

Okay. Well, I want to dig into that. This is notionally a podcast about the 2028 presidential race, not just the horse race, but how elections work, how this country elects presidents, the machinery of it, etc. Polling is a huge piece of that, and we are in a mid-term cycle right now, so we have to talk about it. We're about six weeks out.

So you have a model analyzing who's going to win the House, who's going to win the Senate. How are things looking roughly six weeks out for the election, with Donald Trump's approval rating in the toilet, Republicans looking like, at least when you look at the ad spend, playing a little bit of defense in red states, debating whether to pull out of Georgia, et cetera, et cetera. What does the data say as we're speaking today?

Lakshya Jain (3:09)

As of today, and it's important to note, there are still seven weeks to go till the election, right? As of today, it looks like the Democrats have never been in a better position electorally. And it's surprising for me to say that, because at the start of the year, we thought Democrats had about a 25, 20 to 25 percent chance of winning the Senate quantitatively. But now, ever since the Iran War especially, Donald Trump's approval has just hit a cataclysmic slide to the point where he is maybe the most unpopular president since George W. Bush at the height of the recession.

So when we talk about Trump's unpopularity, driving Democratic gains, it's important to note we're not talking about the standard like, oh, Trump is unpopular and all the chaotic things he does, etc., and the norms and the breaches and whatnot. That gave Republicans an easier out against him. Now, it's cost of living.

And people look at cost of living and they're like, Jesus Christ, this party isn't doing anything. And we need a change. And that's why Democrats have an 80, 90 percent chance of winning the House and a 60 percent chance of winning the Senate. And they're favored in Texas, they're favored in Maine, they're favored in Ohio. They're at a toss up in Iowa. I mean, that's crazy. It's like we're back in 2012 for that one. And it's really, really shocking to see how the maps kind of come together for them. And they could still lose it to be clear, but it's a very good position to be in seven weeks out.