As I write, Democrats are overwhelmingly favoured to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives and given a slim advantage when it comes to the Senate. That would be in keeping with American political history, with the party that controls the White House usually losing legislative seats. But you may want to hold on to your wagers no matter the odds. The margins are slim, candidates are battling for a thin sliver of persuadable voters, polling has been unreliable for years and, perhaps most importantly, Americans are unhappy with the entire political class.
Harvard University’s ElectIt currently gives Democrats a 94 per cent chance of taking the House and a 69 per cent chance of a Senate majority . Decision Desk HQ offers a more restrained 79 per cent advantage for Democrats in the House and 56 percent odds for the Senate. Either way, and given the GOP’s hold on the presidency, the omens look good for the donkey party. Its partisans should be feeling pretty comfortable. But they don’t.
“I don’t want anybody to think this is a sure thing. It’s not,” former President Barack Obama told attendees at a recent Democratic fundraiser. “We could end up, all these races that are showing we’ve got a two- or three-point lead or it’s a toss-up, we could end up losing all of them by two points.”
True, that comment was partially intended to maintain a sense of urgency so donors keep the money flowing in the last few weeks of the campaign. But it also reflects the fact that, as the Washington Post put it last week, even though “Democrats are up in the polls. They’re sick to their stomachs.”
A large measure of the problem is the reliability — or unreliability — of polls. As data analyst Nate Silver points out, in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, “polling error was larger than average, and the polls considerably underestimated” support for President Donald Trump. Polling came closer to the mark in the 2018 and 2022 midterms and in 2024, but “the polls were biased again — but not to the same extent that they overestimated Joe Biden in 2020.”
Just this week, though, Wedgewood Polls, whose numbers were widely reported, conceded it published almost entirely “fabricated numbers,” though it defended the fraud as an “experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities” in the polling industry. That’s the same justification claimed by Median Strategies in August after its bogus survey was exposed. Polling is suffering a bit of a credibility crisis at the moment. Pollsters are trying to improve reliability by changing tactics and techniques, but as Silver notes , “Polling error is hard to predict when pollsters are constantly tinkering with the recipe.”
Also important is that American elections are largely determined by a sliver of the electorate whose votes are up for grabs. Writing in May for the London School of Economics, political scientists Jamie Carson and Stewart Ulrich observed of U.S. politics that “polarization and nationalized party brands limit how much voters change their views” and that “elections are often decided by narrow, targeted movements among subgroups, but those movements unfold inside boundaries that are difficult to cross.”
Complicating matters, that small persuadable segment of voters is motivated less by which candidates they like than by who they hate less. Earlier this month, Pew Research pollsters (yes, leap of faith here) found that, among the shrinking majority of Americans who strongly support one of the two major parties (a record 45 per cent identify as independents ), “Most say they identify this way because they view their own party’s policies as good for the country and the other party’s policies as harmful.”
The battleground is for true independents, supporters of small parties and “leaners” who tend to vote for one party or the other but aren’t really committed. “For these Americans, opposition to the other party’s policies is more of a motivating factor than support for the policies of the party they lean toward,” notes Pew.
Fifty-six percent of Republican leaners and 64 per cent of Democratic leaners “say a major reason they lean toward their preferred party is that the other party’s policies are harmful.” Only small minorities — 34 per cent of those leaning Republican and 27 per cent of those tilting towards Democrats — think the party for which they ultimately vote offers policies that are good for the country. It’s all about who the relatively few persuadable voters consider less terrible.
And Americans really think the entire political class is terrible. Pew reported in July that 58 per cent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party with 59 per cent saying the same of Democrats. Twenty-six percent of voters dislike them both.
Americans have long been moving toward a politics of revulsion. According to a 2019 paper in the Annual Review of Political Science, “a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party.” Partisan animosity drives people to separate from each other not just politically, but also socially and geographically. “Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines.“
Such hostility has obvious ramifications for political violence — people who consider members of other factions to be dangerous may rationalize turning to bombs and guns. Less dramatically, political campaigning seeks less to tout policies and accomplishments than to fan the embers of hate. In a write-up on 2026 political advertising, Metaphase Marketing’s Carlos Courtney commented that “Negative ads still work because they grab attention and can make people feel strong emotions like anger or fear.”
In Arizona, where I live, the airwaves and internet have been dominated by portrayals of candidates as corrupt or depraved, often without any hint as to who the ad’s sponsors favour. Deepfakes raise the stakes with AI-generated images of political hopefuls doing or saying horrible things.
All of which emphasizes that no politician or partisan can rest easy in an age of razor-thin margins, unreliable polls, elections decided by a slim sliver of voters who are open to persuasion and a public that casts ballots based on revulsion rather than support. The outcome of the midterms will come down to anger-fueled votes cast by voters who nudge the final tally a point or two in one direction or another.
If I were to bet, I’d still predict the Democrats taking the House and, probably, the Senate. But I’d hesitate to put money on the outcome.
National Post
