Pew Research: “Polls consistently documented the electorate’s dark mood this year, including deep dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump, even among some of his 2024 voters. That frustration was particularly focused on his economic policies.”

“Polls also consistently identified a wide enthusiasm gap, with Democratic supporters more interested, engaged and likely to show up to vote than Republican supporters. Indeed, Democratic supporters were also more likely to take preelection surveys, as a number of our colleagues reported.”

“In the end, polls found more than enough opportunities for Democratic pickups in the Senate to win a majority in the chamber, and they indicated a likely Democratic takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives. But the polling understated the size of the eventual Democratic victory in many of the major statewide races (Georgia and Texas, in particular), as well as in the overall House vote.”

New York Times: “An analysis… using statistical methods, found that for most of the midterm race, prediction markets performed no better than election forecasts, which produce odds using polling and other indicators instead of betting activity.”

“But as Election Day neared, prediction markets performed better as forecasts and polling became stale.”

Marc Novicoff: “Heading into the midterms, everyone who follows American politics had the same question: Were the polls correct, or would they underestimate Republicans once again? The answer turned out to be neither. This time around, the polls undercounted a different kind of voter: Democrats.”

“According to the Silver Bulletin polling averages, Democrats were on track to win the U.S. House popular vote by nine points and narrowly flip a few Senate seats in states that Donald Trump had won by double digits. Democratic voters across the country saw these numbers and braced for disappointment. They remembered the polling misses of 2016 (which underestimated Trump by about three points on average) and 2024 (which did too) and believed that they could be watching another blue mirage.”

“In fact, even this year’s seemingly incredible poll numbers turned out to significantly understate Democrats’ strength. Democrats are now expected to win the House popular vote by 13 points, the largest such victory in 50 years. And that four-point national polling error was small compared with the miss in certain states.”

“Political polling experts hailed a ‘great night’ for the industry after surveys accurately foresaw much of the Democratic blue wave that swept across the U.S. in midterm elections,” The Guardian reports.

“In only a handful of U.S. Senate races, including Texas and New Hampshire, key polls failed to gauge the scale of the Democratic victory over Republicans on Tuesday.”

NBC News: “Nearly half of voters say they view the midterm election as an opportunity for a major rebuke of President Donald Trump’s performance, according to early results from the NBC News Exit Poll.”

“Forty-three percent said one reason for their vote was to express opposition to the president — far higher than the share who said the same in the 2018 midterm election during Trump’s first term.”

“The early results show that Trump’s midterm campaign blitz in support of Republican candidates in recent weeks has done little to lift his job approval rating.”

“Mark Halperin said the polls are looking good for Republicans — just not the ones you’ve probably seen,” Mediaite reports.

Said Halperin: “I’m going to start with what’s great for Republicans: the private polling that I cite all the time is within the margin of error in almost every one of these races. So if you think a single Senate race that’s currently Red is going to flip to Blue is a sure thing, besides North Carolina, I would tell you you are wrong.”

“More than two-thirds of U.S. voters are unhappy with President Donald Trump’s handling of inflation and affordability — a striking condemnation of the White House and Republicans on the eve of Tuesday’s midterm elections,” the Financial Times reports.

“Nearly 70 percent of voters disapprove of how Trump has handled price rises and the cost of living, according to the final nationwide pre-election survey conducted by the FT and Focaldata.”

G. Elliot Morris: “I give the Democrats a 99-in-100 chance of taking 218 seats or more. It would be historically surprising — as in, there has never been a House polling miss this large — for Republicans to hold their majority in the chamber…”

”If the polls are as wrong as they were in the 2018 and 2022 midterms, Democrats will walk away tonight with 54 seats in the U.S. Senate. If the polls miss as they did in the recent presidential years, they’ll likely fall short of a majority with just 50.”

Nate Silver: “When we launched the model back in August, Democrats were strong favorites to take the House but the Senate was close to a tossup. Today, a Democratic House majority looks all but certain, and the polls indicate that they should also win the upper chamber. In fact, Democrats’ Senate win probability as of our final update is just a few percentage points lower than their House win probability was at launch.”

Politico: “If you’re looking for a sign of how dire the environment looks for Republicans in November 2026, stark new results from The Politico Poll show the bloc that boosted Donald Trump back into office two years ago may be moving on and getting over.”

“Roughly 9% of Trump 2024 voters plan to cast their ballot for a Democrat this year, compared with just over 2% of Kamala Harris voters who plan to back Republicans, according to the poll.”

“Central to that shift are Latinos and young people. At the end of last year, 56% of Hispanic Trump voters identified as MAGA Republicans and 50% of Trump voters ages 20 to 29 said they were certain to vote. As of October, those numbers dropped to 37% and 38%, respectively — an alarming sign for Republicans ahead of election night.”

Nate Cohn: “You can trust them to a degree. You can trust the polls to usually be in the ballpark, but you can’t trust them to be exactly ‘right.’ Polls are inherently imprecise and subject to many sources of error.”

“So if by ‘trust’ you mean ‘assume that the leading candidate will win,’ then the answer is ‘no.’ The polls have been wrong by this standard before and they will be wrong again. But if trust means ‘rely on the polls as the best source of information on the electorate, even if an inexact one,’ then the answer is yes.”

Dan Pfeiffer: “One year ago, when people asked me whether Democrats could win the Senate, I said we needed a perfect storm to have a chance.”

“Well, with one day to go, a brand-new set of New York Times/Siena polls makes it abundantly clear that the perfect storm has arrived.”

“The polls show the political winds at Democrats’ backs even in deep Trump country. If they are right, a big blue wave is about to wash across America. Democrats lead in all seven Senate battlegrounds, in some cases by large margins.”

Nate Silver: “They might be wrong again, but it’s getting hard to deny that polls point toward a really big year for Democrats.”

“Democrats gained ground right to the end in the final New York Times/Siena University polls of the 2026 midterm campaign. The party is ahead in all seven states likeliest to decide control of the Senate: Michigan, Kansas, Texas, Maine, Ohio and, more narrowly, Alaska and Iowa,” the New York Times reports.

“A substantial Democratic lead in Texas? Kansas? Anything like these results would have been unfathomable just a few months ago.”

“In today’s polarized era, there’s no precedent for a party to fare this well in so many states that are generally safe wins for the other side. The only plausible comparisons are the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, but the recent polls outpace even those.”

“There’s a reason that political analysts focus on a president’s popularity just before midterm elections: It’s often a good barometer of the national mood,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

”Only two presidents in recent decades have defied the trend of a president’s party losing seats in midterms: Bill Clinton in 1998, and George W. Bush in 2002. They had the highest pre-midterm ratings in Wall Street Journal polling, dating to 1990, with more than 60% of voters approving of their job performance and about 30% disapproving.”

Wall Street Journal: “After exploding in popularity this year, prediction markets are heading into Tuesday’s midterm elections in the U.S. looking to stake their claim as the antidote to years of failures by pollsters to capture accurate estimates on electorates around the globe.”

“But results this year are showing big surprises. In Brazil, Serbia and Wisconsin, elections which all polled as high as 90% for one candidate, were upset by their supposed long shots. At both Kalshi and its rival Polymarket, traders appear to have gotten it wrong on the next Israeli prime minister—and three days after the polls closed, they still can’t agree.”

Washington Post: “In 13 of the 27 races we looked at, including the Senate races in Maine and Texas, there’s less variation among polls than we would normally expect.”

“One possible reason is that pollsters are correcting their samples in similar ways. As it has gotten harder to reach voters who rarely participate in elections, many pollsters now ask people who they voted for in 2024 — then adjust the poll so its mix of Trump and Harris voters looks like the 2024 electorate. That can make polls look alike even if they reached different groups of people.”