Victor Davis Hanson: Why the Polls May Not Tell the Full Story of the 2026 Midterms

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. 

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

We’re about five weeks from the midterms, and maybe we should have another update. Both sides seem to be increasingly confident, although I think the mood on the Democrats is that they’re about to achieve a historic capture of both the Senate and the House and put an end to Donald Trump’s counter-revolution. 

The Republicans is a little bit more tentative. They feel that very slowly there’s a turnaround, and the momentum may be going their way, but they’re not sure they have enough time yet. They’re worried about two issues: the price of gas and the unpopularity of the Iran war. If you look at the polls though, there’s some things to remember about if we go through these known unknowns of the election. 

The polls are very confident that the Democrats are gonna take the House and get very close, if not take the Senate. But we remember in the primaries, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan was supposed to defeat his opponent by nine to 10 points and only won by a point and a half. The polls were way off in the Francesca Hong, Wisconsin Senate race. 

And they were off in many. They were overvaluing or they were too optimistic as they were during the Trump-Harris [election]. As a general rule, most pollsters are: A, Democratic. Most polls tend to exaggerate the strength of a Democratic candidate for most of the race. And C, as the race gets down to the Election Day deadline, many of the pollsters will be more realistic so that they can save their reputations after the balloting is conducted. 

In addition to the polls, there’s uncertainty. We don’t know the effect. We don’t hear much about it. We had these great red-state redistricting wars, and we had the controversial Supreme Court racial gerrymandering case that said you could not artificially craft congressional districts for seven hundred and fifty or so thousand constituents on the basis of race to ensure an election of a person of a particular race. 

But we don’t know. We haven’t had really any analyses of how that’s going to translate in favor of the Republicans. Another known unknown is that in these individual key races in the swing states, states like Michigan and Texas especially, and Minnesota, it’s not really a swing state, but it is this time, we see that the Democratic candidates are outraising the Republicans. 

However, on the national level, when we look at political action committee money and private donors like Elon Musk, you can make the argument that the Republicans have a greater war chest. So it’s hard to adjudicate exactly how the money’s going to be used, where it’s going to come from, and who has the advantage. 

Again, another known unknown. Something that came up with the Graham Platner candidacy that failed in Maine is that no one really knew how radical these socialists were. Let me give you a little context. Mayor [Zohran] Mamdani won New York, which is a very, very blue left-wing constituency, and he was pretty much not shy of saying that he was a socialist. 

The same thing was true of other candidates in the Democratic primaries in overwhelmingly blue areas in New York, in Los Angeles, in Denver. However, we really had not seen socialist, avowed socialist or Democrats whose records are indistinguishable or their advocacy is indistinguishable from socialists. 

We’ve never really seen them in statewide races. So we wanted to know how they would react, and it’s been quite amazing. Mr. [James] Talarico in Texas has disowned all of his prior record of talking about a multi-gendered God who’s nonbinary and that there were several genders, in his commentary about his favorite drag queen person, his desire to fight his whiteness, etc. 

These have dripped out. The same thing is true of Mr. [Abdul] El-Sayed in Michigan, Ms. [Peggy] Flanagan in Minnesota. And so what’s happening is now that these hard-left candidates are in statewide races, they have the enthusiasm of that youthful, and I’ll be candid, overpolled group. But as the race wears on, they are desperately scrambling to hide, cleanse their social media accounts or mask their true socialist belief. 

And what’s happening is that causes a reaction from conservatives that are desperate to uncover all the things they’ve said in the past, and they’re pretty embarrassing, to tell you the truth. That’s another known unknown.  

In other words, how much information can the right get out to the public and disseminate it that shows that the candidates on the Democratic side are trying to hide who they are, so that they can get elected and then reveal their true selves only after the balloting is finished. 

How does that translate into what the races themselves look like? I would say Mr. El-Sayed is ahead in the polls, but given his increasingly revealed radical record and the overpolling that he enjoyed in the primary, I’d say his opponent, Mike Rogers, has a good chance.  

Troy Jackson is very close in most polls, if not in the lead, although Susan Collins in Maine is ahead in, I think, one poll. 

Traditionally, she on Election Day is anywhere from three to eight points behind in her past record, in her past two successful senatorial elections, and she wins. So I would say that she has a good chance of winning over Troy Jackson. Peggy Flanagan should have been a shoo-in. She is the Minnesota lieutenant governor. 

She’s very left-wing. Minnesota’s a left-wing state. But Michelle Tafoya is neck and neck. She was a sideline sports commentator. She has all this name recognition. She’s very smart, well-versed, attractive, well-funded. And in contrast, Ms. Flanagan is dealing with this Somali multibillion-dollar fraud scandal, which as lieutenant governor she didn’t seem to be worried about or at least didn’t move to act against it, and she’s tarred by her association with the very unpopular Tim Walz. 

That’s an odd race, but nobody expected that. James Talarico has been ahead in the polls because the conventional wisdom was Mr. [Ken] Paxton was a very weak candidate. John Cornyn, who was sort of a RINO Republican, sober, judicious, well-liked, but not necessarily a MAGA adherent, maybe he was an apostate on 10% of his voting, lost that primary, lost it handily, but he would have been a stronger candidate in the general election. 

Democrats always say they’re going to flip Texas because of the changing demography. The so-called white population is either no larger than any other group or a minority in Texas. The largest constituency seems to be Hispanic and a growing number of immigrants from India. Put that all together, and the Democrats always get ecstatic that they can flip Texas. 

They may do it, but I would be surprised if Texans are going to vote for someone who rejects the use of beef, said he was a vegetarian, commented on his favorite drag queen dancer, and apparently is ashamed of being white, and he has various views about the genders of divinities, and he’s also said that Christian. He’s spoken in negative terms about his own religion. 

Iowa. We don’t really know who’s going to win that race, but it is, Josh Turek was a very strong Democratic candidate, and it looks like maybe now he might not win. If you look at Kansas, the incumbent Roger Marshall has been behind. He’s almost tied now with the challenger Adam Hamilton. 

Just to close out, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire were all considered surprising because they are either blue states or purple states. Excuse me, red states or purple states. They thought that they would be sure Republican wins, and then the Democrats have done very well in polling, but it’s not over yet. 

The Republicans tend to be closing a little bit. So put it all together, the polls are, we really don’t know the effect of these polls, the reliability of them. We don’t know exactly who’s gonna get how much money and from where. We really don’t know how well the Republicans are gonna be able to expose the socialist background of their opponents. 

But the big known unknowns, again, what’s gonna happen in Iran in the next five weeks? Is the regime going to get stronger? Is it gonna close the Strait? Is gas gonna skyrocket, or is there going to be a coalition, a new coalition of Gulf states, Israel, and the United States? Will gas stabilize or go down? 

Will the Iranian regime fall? Nobody really knows. I would say I will finish on one piece of advice. I think the Republican ticket in each state needs to emphasize that besides, other than gas prices, there’s a lot of good news. Lowest poverty rate we’ve learned this week in history, highest per capita income at $87,000 per person, record stock market, inflation, even with the price of gas is not, it’s only half of what it averaged during the Joe Biden administration. 

I could go on, but there’s a lot of good news that they could campaign on. And, I would say that the chances that the Republicans are gonna hold on to the Senate have gone up 60/40. The chances that the Democrats will take the House have declined probably from 70/30 to 60/40 in their favor. 

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