Are the latest US midterm polls right?

Voters in the US head to the polls next Tuesday for what promises to be the most unpredictable midterm elections of recent times.

At the start of the year Republicans were projected to easily re-take the House and Senate. But the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, combined with falling gas prices, stabilising inflation and improving approval ratings for Joe Biden, then fuelled Democrats’ hopes of holding on to one or even both houses of Congress.

The national mood has changed again over the past month, however, amid growing fears about immigration and the worsening state of the economy – issues that “are much more likely to drive voters toward Republicans, who have been hammering President Biden and his administration for higher prices at the pump and the grocery store”, said ABC News.

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What are the latest polls saying?

“After months showing the Democrats running very well for a midterm year, the polls now offer pretty strong evidence that the party can’t overcome political gravity,” said The New York Times’s chief political analyst Nate Cohn. “At least not entirely.”

Latest projections by polling aggregator RealClearPolitics has the GOP picking up three seats in the Senate – Nevada, Georgia and Arizona – which would give the Republicans a 53-47 majority in the upper house. But political analysis site FiveThirtyEight had the race to win control of the Senate as a “dead heat”.

Politico’s chief election reporter Steve Shepard also said the contest was too close to call, adding: “Republicans’ diminishing national tailwinds – along with some struggling candidates – have imperilled the GOP's fight to flip the Senate.”

The Republicans’ prospects of reclaiming the House look more positive, with RealClearPolitics and Politico both predicting the party will make the necessary gains. The GOP is “strongly favoured” to win the House, said Shepard, although “the size of its majority is still very much in question”.

If recent polls are correct, “the race is in a very delicate spot”, said Cohn in the NYT. “Everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total Republican rout becomes imaginable.”

Can the polls be trusted?

Pollsters in the US have faced stinging criticism for their performances in recent election cycles. Having called the 2016 presidential election wrongly for Hillary Clinton, pollsters against underestimated support for Donald Trump in 2020.

One possible reason for these repeated errors, said The Washington Post, “was something the experts called nonresponse bias, with Democrats participating in polls at higher rates than Republicans”.

“Many polls have attempted to measure and correct for partisan nonresponse, but these adjustments have been far from perfect,” said the paper, and “how effective they are in reducing error over the long run” remains to be seen.

Such measures aside, Republicans are still getting undercounted in polls, warned Michael Barone in the Washington Examiner. “Apparently, ’Shy Trump’ voters have been refusing to be polled – an attitude possibly fortified” by Biden’s “recent denunciation of Trump-supporting Republicans as extremists”, Barone reported.

“I think it’s a combination of the polls themselves becoming a little less trustworthy, and the way that we use polling becoming a little less effective,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster and the cofounder of Echelon Insights, on the Plain English podcast.

The show’s host, Derek Thompson ,argued in an article on The Ringer that “the golden age of polling is over”.

“Error margins are rising as fewer people are responding to survey calls,” Thompson wrote. “That means we’re flying a bit out of our depth: political campaigns, commentators, and voters can’t be sure that the polling averages that they’re seeing in the news are an accurate reflection of reality.”