More on the Difficulty of Polling the 2026 Election

Many posts have discussed pollsters' challenges, including the plunge in response rates.  This year, the challenges are even greater.  In an polarized era, partisan nonresponse bias is a big problem.

 Nate  Cohn at NYT:

There are two factors that help explain why it’s possible for the polls to be right, even when Mr. Trump’s supporters are less likely to respond.

One is turnout. There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that Mr. Trump’s supporters aren’t just less likely to respond to surveys, but also less likely to vote in midterm elections. This would help explain the basic pattern of polling error during the Trump era: Polls have a pretty good record in midterms but not in presidential elections.

The second factor is a technique called “weighting,” in which pollsters make statistical adjustments to give more weight to voters from groups underrepresented in the survey responses. This gives pollsters a chance to produce reasonable results, simply by giving more weight to registered Republicans, self-identified Republicans or the voters who say they voted for Mr. Trump who did respond to the survey.

Weighting is not a panacea. That’s because nonresponse bias can run much deeper than what can be observed and corrected in the data. A poll might be weighted to have the right number of Trump supporters but still have the wrong kind of Trump supporters — and particularly the kind of Trump supporter who might be voting Democratic.

Imagine, for instance, if the Trump voters who responded to a pollster were likelier to be the kind who supported Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. A pollster might then have too many of the kinds of Trump supporters who would readily defect to Democrats. The Post believed it had this kind of issue in Kansas: Even after weighting, the results still seemed too good for Democrats.

Despite its imperfections, weighting has kept the survey industry afloat. In elections like 2018 or 2022, it was sufficient. For many pollsters in 2024, it probably prevented another misfire like those in 2016 or 2020. As far as I can tell, many public pollsters — maybe even most public pollsters — would have shown Kamala Harris with a clear lead over Mr. Trump in 2024 if they had used the weighting techniques that were common back in 2018 or 2020. Instead, they’ve adopted heavy-handed weighting techniques that can bludgeon even the worst samples back into the ballpark.

You can see why it’s hard to make any assumptions about the polling error this cycle in today’s Times/Siena polls. This summer, we adopted a new set of weighting techniques to improve our polling. When we re-evaluated our 2024 polls with this new weighting approach, we saw that our polls would have been about 1.6 points better on average. The difference felt meaningful, but it was fundamentally modest.
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What does all of this mean for 2026? Well, you can choose your own adventure. More than anything, it illustrates how hard it is to predict how the polls might err.

Maybe it implies that we’ve adopted weighting techniques that can handle the problems that caused the Times/Siena poll to overestimate Democratic strength in the past, especially in white working-class states. If so, maybe we’re dead-on.

Or perhaps one could argue that the Times/Siena polls will underestimate Democrats. Our polls were accurate in 2018 and 2022, after all, so maybe one should trust the old approach in a midterm election. If so, maybe the Democrats will do even better than our polls suggest.

Or maybe the extraordinarily blue results on our old methodology and the increased effect of weighting suggest that nonresponse bias is worse than ever. If so, polls could seriously underestimate Republicans once again. There’s no reason to assume that 2016 or 2020 is the worst case scenario.

We’ll find out soon enough.

Why Polling Is Difficult This year

Many posts have discussed pollsters' challenges, including the plunge in response rates.  This year, the challenges are even greater.

Michael Dimock at The Hill:

First, we’re seeing more completely “synthetic surveys,” — polls that purport to measure public opinion but don’t actually survey humans. Instead, they use AI to model what people would say. Our research on synthetic surveys finds they are not reliable substitutes for public opinion. Separately, we have also seen polls being shared that are entirely fabricated without disclosure.

Second, uncertainty about voting mechanics, such as mail-in ballots, changing election laws in some states and even concerns about voter intimidation could influence turnout in hard-to-model ways. Widespread mid-cycle redistricting has scrambled voters’ awareness of who’s on their ballots. And the 2026 race has fewer incumbents on the ballot than any general election since 1992.

Third, the issues of AI and data centers have swelled into the public dialogue but haven’t yet become completely polarized by party. This makes the impact of AI on elections more dependent on local conditions, such as planned or existing data centers nearby, and what candidates are saying about the issue.

In short, predicting who will vote has always been hard in lower turnout elections. It’s become more challenging over time, and 2026 has a swirl of unknowns compounding the challenge — a perfect storm ripe for confusion. Any one of these factors could yield surprises that are impossible to predict, even for the highest quality polls.

His Holiness Votes

The first American Pope makes news.

Christopher Hale at Letters from Leo:

Pope Leo XIV has requested a mail ballot to vote in next Tuesday’s midterm elections.

I confirmed the request this evening with the Will County Clerk’s office in suburban Chicago, where the pope remains registered under his birth name, Robert Francis Prevost. He made the request on Oct. 3, a month before Election Day.

Independent reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times, published this evening, matches my own.

WJOL in Joliet first reported the request on Oct. 23, citing sources who said someone close to the pope had asked for the ballot to be sent to his registered address in New Lenox.

That address belongs to his brother John, who was in Rome this week. On Wednesday, John Prevost joined about 50 parishioners from St. Jude Catholic Church in New Lenox who met Leo in St. Peter’s Square at the end of a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. Augustine, Vatican News reported.

It is plausible that John carried the ballot to his brother and is now bringing it home to Will County, though neither the Vatican nor the family has said so.

Pope Leo XIV meets about 50 pilgrims from St. Jude Catholic Church in New Lenox, Ill., among them his brother John Prevost (in white, front row at left), in St. Peter’s Square on Oct. 28. (Vatican Media)

It is not immediately known whether Leo has already returned his ballot to the county. Once he does, Leo will become the first pope in the two-thousand-year history of the Catholic Church to vote in a secular election.

Bernie Moreno's Religious Test

 Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.  

Michael Luciano at Mediaite:

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) said on Wednesday night that anyone who does not believe that Jesus died for their salvation is unfit to serve in the Senate and “should be nowhere near Washington.”

Moreno spoke at a rally in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he was joined by President Donald Trump and Sen. Jon Husted, who is in a close race against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

During his remarks, Moreno turned his attention to Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is in a similarly tight contest with former Rep. Mike Rogers. If El-Sayed wins, he would be the first Muslim to serve in the U.S. Senate.

“On Monday, I went up and campaigned with Mike Rogers because he’s in a race with somebody that just is an affront to me as an American,” Moreno said. “By the way, an affront to me as a naturalized citizen to this country.”

Moreno was born in Colombia. El-Sayed was born in suburban Detroit.

“This character, Abdul El-Sayed, can be nowhere near Washington, D.C.,” he continued before saying non-Christians have no business in the Senate. “Do you think he understands that concept? That our rights come from God Almighty? That Jesus came here for our salvation. He should be nowhere near Washington, D.C. And Mike Rogers is gonna kick his ass on Tuesday.”

Moreno’s litmus test – that only people who believe that “Jesus came here for our salvation” should serve in the Senate – would exclude not only Muslims, but Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, and everyone else who does not subscribe to his religion.

It is worth noting that Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a Hindu, also spoke at the rally.

Article VI of the Constitution famously bans religious requirements as a precondition for public office, stating that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Naturalized Citizens as Eligible Voters

 Many posts have discussed immigration. Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare. But naturalized citizens voting legally is common.

Shifra Dayak and Mia Hennen at Pew:

An estimated 250 million people in the United States are eligible to vote in this year’s midterm elections. Around one-in-ten of them – or 25 million – are naturalized citizens, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

Naturalized citizens are people who were born outside the U.S. and gained American citizenship through naturalization. They are generally eligible to vote if they are at least 18 years old, as is the case with people born in the U.S. and those born abroad to American parents.

The number of naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote more than doubled from 2000 to 2024 (the most recent year for which data is available). That is much larger than the increase in the total eligible voter population during that time period. In 2000, approximately 12 million people – about 6.2% of all eligible voters that year – were naturalized citizens.

 

 

Views of Federal Agencies: Public Cold on ICE

Many posts have discussed bureaucracy.

Americans’ views of several major federal government agencies and departments are generally positive, with some exceptions.

On balance, Americans view eight of 12 federal agencies we asked about more favorably than unfavorably, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 5,062 adults conducted from Sept. 28 to Oct. 4, 2026.

The National Park Service, National Weather Service and U.S. Postal Service are viewed especially positively: Two-thirds or more of Americans view each favorably.

The least popular agency of the 12 asked about is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A majority of Americans (56%) express an unfavorable opinion of ICE, while 35% express a favorable opinion.

 

 

More on Russian Influence Efforts

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are prominent influencers.

They are still at it in 2026

Steven Lee Myers and Dustin Volz at NYT:

Even as President Trump pursued a thawing of relations with the Kremlin this week, a covert Russian influence operation targeted the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas, James Talarico, by spreading a fabricated claim of misconduct.

Several groups of researchers who track Russian disinformation operations attributed the claim to Storm-1516, a covert group that in 2024 peddled a similarly unfounded accusation against Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee.

The attack followed a flurry of Russian posts on social media in recent weeks and provided the latest indication that Moscow is once again targeting an American election with online influence operations. In recent weeks, Russia has ramped up those efforts, according to a U.S. official familiar with classified intelligence assessments on the matter.

Most of the Russian content so far, spread by bot networks around the world, has targeted Democratic candidates, especially in closely contested Senate races that could determine control of Congress in Mr. Trump’s remaining two years in office. Still, the intelligence assessments do not specify that Russia is explicitly seeking to harm one political party more than the other, the official said.

“I characterize it to people as kind of same old, same old,” Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Wednesday, referring broadly to Russian efforts so far this campaign. The Russians are “throwing everything out there to generate a sense of chaos and anarchy” in the voting process, he added.

Mr. Himes said Russia was focused “in a bipartisan way” on trying to harm American politicians who had been supportive of Ukraine.