Democrat-friendly polls keep telling Donald Trump his party is headed for a midterm wipeout.
Republicans who remember 2016 and 2024 smell something rotten in those numbers.
And Trump’s pollster just named one target the bad polls may really be aiming at.
McLaughlin Says the Lopsided Samples Are No Accident
John McLaughlin has advised President Trump on polling for years, and he isn’t buying the blue-wave story the networks keep selling.
On Just the News, No Noise, McLaughlin walked through the surveys that bother him most. One New York poll put Republicans at 22 percent of its sample. In the last race for governor there, Republicans made up 30 percent of the people who actually turned out, according to McLaughlin.
Eight points is a lot of Republicans to lose before anybody answers a single question. Shave a quarter of one party out of the room, and the headline number pretty much writes itself.
“I think it’s deliberate because a lot of the media that covers those polls has a bias,” McLaughlin said.
He added a second complaint that anybody who has watched cable news for the last decade will recognize. “Sometimes they don’t put the liberal pollsters through the same kind of scrutiny.”
Then McLaughlin tossed out three words that deserved far more airtime than they got. “It affects donors,” he said.
Bad Polls Go Straight for the Checkbook
Think about how a donor decides where to send money in late October. A retired contractor in Tulsa doesn’t have a field team knocking doors in Texas or Maine. He reads the polls, same as everybody else.
If a race looks lost, the checkbook stays in the drawer. If a race looks winnable, he writes the check.
So a poll does a lot more than predict an election. It steers the cash that decides one.
And Democrats know exactly how that game works, because they rode it to a fundraising record in 2020.
That year, South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison went after Lindsey Graham’s Senate seat. Pollsters kept calling the race a coin flip, and one Quinnipiac survey had the two men tied at 48 percent. Liberal donors from Manhattan to Malibu ate it up.
Harrison hauled in $57 million in the third quarter of 2020 alone, the biggest three-month total any Senate candidate had ever reported. His campaign counted 1.5 million donations from 994,000 donors, with an average gift of $37. By late October, Harrison told the Associated Press that the money was already gone.
Graham won by 12 points.
Up in Maine, Sara Gideon led US Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) in nearly every public poll that year, and one Quinnipiac survey had Gideon up by 12. Donors piled on. Gideon raised $69.5 million to Collins’ $27.1 million through the latest reports before Election Day, according to the Boston Globe.
Collins won by 8.6 points.
But the money machine runs in both directions, and that’s the part McLaughlin worries about. A poll that makes a Democrat look competitive opens wallets on the Left. A poll that makes a Republican look finished snaps wallets shut on the Right.
Ken Paxton’s Texas Race Looks Like Exhibit A
McLaughlin pointed to Texas as proof these surveys can miss by a country mile. He cited a 2024 poll of the state that had Kamala Harris beating Trump 49 percent to 41 percent. Trump went on to carry Texas with 56 percent of the vote.
Now some polls show Democrat James Talarico ahead of Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race. McLaughlin suspects voters are watching a rerun.
And those numbers hand a perfect excuse to Republicans who never wanted Paxton on the ballot. Paxton beat John Cornyn in the primary with Trump’s endorsement, and Cornyn has declined to raise money for him. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have held back the kind of television spending a party normally pours into a seat it wants to keep. A gloomy poll lets them dress up payback as prudence.
Democrats play it differently. When Abdul El-Sayed knocked off Haley Stevens, the establishment favorite, in Michigan, Chuck Schumer and the party brass fell in line behind the progressive winner. One party protects its insurgents. The other side’s insiders go shopping for a reason to cut theirs loose.
The Folks Who Promised a Hillary Lock Want Another Shot
McLaughlin rattled off the misses like a ballplayer reading his opponent’s error column. “Remember when there was a Hillary lock in 2016,” he said. He reminded viewers of the Joe Biden blue wave that never showed up in 2020 and of how good Kamala Harris looked at this stage of the 2024 race.
“So there’s been, you know, a lot of bad calls, bad polling, and it seems like they’re doubling down on the bad polls in this election cycle because when you get into the internals of the polls, they just don’t make sense,” McLaughlin said.
Now, a fair-minded reader could raise an eyebrow here. McLaughlin works for Trump, and a pollster on one team calling the other team’s numbers crooked isn’t exactly breaking news. Nobody can climb inside a newsroom and prove what some editor had in mind.
But intent almost doesn’t matter. Lopsided on purpose or lopsided by sloppiness, the donor in Tulsa reads the same headline and makes the same call. The damage lands on Republican campaigns either way.
And the early vote may add to the gloom. McLaughlin noted that early ballots usually lean Democrat because Republicans have historically waited to vote on Election Day itself. Anyone treating the early tallies as a final score may get a rude surprise on November 3.
McLaughlin doesn’t see a wave in either direction. He counts eight Senate races as toss-ups, more than 70 House seats in play, and at least 17 House races he calls pure toss-ups.
That’s the kind of map where a few million dollars, held back or sent, could decide who runs Congress for the last two years of the Trump presidency.
But McLaughlin himself wasn’t calling the outcome. “I’ve never seen it so close,” he said. “So it really is a toss-up election.”
Sources: Just the News, “Trump pollster warns of inaccurate midterm polls: ‘I think it’s deliberate’”; Business Insider and Politico, Jaime Harrison third-quarter 2020 fundraising; Associated Press via WLOS and WFAE, Harrison record haul and spending; CBS News, Harrison fundraising record; WCIV/Associated Press, 2020 South Carolina Senate results; Boston Globe, Maine Senate polling and fundraising, October 2020; Central Maine and Bangor Daily News, 2020 Maine Senate polling; 2020 United States Senate election in Maine, official results summary.