Polls Are Even Worse In 2026 Than in 2016

Americans who still treat the polling industry as a weather report are flying blind into a midterm general election.

Joseph Ford Cotto | September 15, 2026

Americans who still treat the polling industry as a weather report are flying blind into a midterm general election.

The primary season just finished exposing an industry that has been rotting for at least a decade. The misses were not small. They were serial, public, and in select cases, worse than incompetent. Americans need a reliable map of races that will decide who writes tax law, runs committees, and sets the country’s direction. Right now, much of the map is junk.

In Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, polls had the Islamic leftist Abdul Mohammed El-Sayed ahead by double digits on average. He won by one point. In Wisconsin’s blue gubernatorial primary, democratic socialist Francesca Hong led by large margins in survey after survey. She lost. In Minnesota’s Senate primary, mainstream liberal Angie Craig was shown even or ahead of uber-woke Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan. Flanagan won by nearly 20 points.

In Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, #Resistance kingpin Alexander Vindman was the national donor favorite. Polling indicated that he was the double-digit leader over the obscure state lawmaker Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialists of America member. Nixon beat Vindman by double digits.

On the Republican side, surveys had James Fishback, a fringe Zoomer social media personality who appreciates Zohran Mamdani, closing on the President Donald J. Trump-endorsed Byron Donalds. Fishback finished around 11 percent. Donalds took about 48 percent. Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, a Gov. Ron DeSantis appointee, took about 25 percent, principally from old-school movement conservatives.

Those were not rounding errors. They were a collapse of the product the public is sold as science. Needless to say, this list is not exhaustive of polling misfires around the country.

Patrick Basham, a veteran pollster who runs the Democracy Institute, had much to say on my program, News Sight. “Maybe we........

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