This just in, according to new poll results: Americans don’t trust polls.
Only 25% of Americans said political surveys correctly estimate votes, according to a new POLITICO Poll, conducted by PF Global. The result reveals that a significant portion of the public lacks faith in the industry as it contends with accusations of consistently failing to reach Republican voters.
It comes amid an intensely scrutinized 2026 midterm cycle, where public polling and campaigns’ internal polls have shown many races within the margin of error in key battlegrounds and in once-safe red territory.
Roughly one in four respondents say that polls showing a blue wave coming in November are wrong, and they expect Republicans to win key races. And 41% of Americans — including voters of both parties — either say polls tend to underestimate Democrats or that they tend to underestimate Republicans.
There have been some high-profile blunders: Polls have missed themark throughout the Trump era. This cycle alone, surveys in Democratic primaries incorrectly predicted that progressive Francesca Hong would win the race for Wisconsin governor and that Abdul El-Sayed — who did become Democrat’s Michigan Senate nominee — would win by a much wider margin than the 1 percentage point victory he eked out.
Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans have cast doubt on the latest forecasts: The polls are “grossly underestimating Republican enthusiasm around the country,” Johnson said on Fox News this week, adding that “more and more Republicans are unwilling to participate in these surveys.”
President Donald Trump has called the polls “fake” and “rigged.” Vice President JD Vance said he tells people to ignore the polls because they have a “demotivating effect on our voters.”
Pollsters know their industry is facing heavy scrutiny. However: “There isn’t another thing waiting in the wings to replace the full purpose of this tool,” said Charlotte Swasey, the director of analytics for the Democratic think tank Searchlight Institute, told POLITICO. “This is what we have, and it’s difficult, it’s increasingly difficult. But it’s not dead by any sense of the word.”
Pollsters have made a number of changes over the years — like capturing respondents across all levels of education attainment or adjusting their methodologies to account for low response rates among any given group.
Still, roughly two in five Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 say political polls tend to underestimate Republicans.
Their feelings are not completely unfounded. In 2016, pollsters grossly underestimated support for then-candidate Trump, with most polls coalescing around a relatively secure victory for former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.
Distrust is especially widespread among Trump voters who identify as “MAGA Republicans” — his most loyal base. Three in five MAGA Trump voters say the polls indicating Democrats will win key races next week are incorrect. Among non-MAGA Trump voters, just a third feel the same.
“National polls always underestimate support for Republicans,” said RNC national press secretary Natalie Baldassarre. “Polls may suggest one thing, but the American people get the final say, and Republicans remain laser-focused on driving voters to the polls, defying history, and protecting our majorities.”
“I do think that non-response among base Republican voters in some of these red states is a problem,” Christine Matthews, president of public opinion polling firm Bellwether Research, told POLITICO in a recent interview.
Republican candidates and officials are banking on the non-response caveat as Senate races in states like Kansas, Mississippi and Nebraska — and to some extent, in South Carolina and Louisiana — all tighten, with less than one week until Election Day. If polling proves true, they could experience once-unthinkable losses in deep-red territory.
But distrust is not limited to Republicans.
Many in both parties were outraged after one group — Wedgewood Polls — admitted under scrutiny from FiftyPlusOne to using fake data in its polling results in several Democratic primaries, which some believe impacted election results. Another group published fake polling data on the Los Angeles mayoral race as a test to see how the data would travel before being verified.
And just under a third of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris say political polls tend to underestimate Democrats.
Part of the distrust can come down to the fact that polls are not intended to forecast outcomes. They are a snapshot of public sentiment at a given point in time — and people can change their minds. One in five Americans said in POLITICO’s survey they have filled in a poll on how they would vote differently than how they actually voted.
“Of course there are people who say something to a poll and then do something different a couple of weeks later,” said Seb Wride, head of polling at London-based PF Global, POLITICO’s polling partner. “I think it’s quite possible that some of the races that were real big misses earlier this year were decided in the very last week.”
According to a recent POLITICO survey, polls — which, when conducted correctly, involve careful planning and meticulous methodology — don’t earn much more trust than prediction markets, where odds are determined simply by bets placed by the public.
Just 18% of people said they trusted poll-based forecasts over prediction markets to correctly predict the outcome of an election. That’s a marginal lead on the 12% of people who said they trust prediction markets over polls. A third said they trust neither.
Still, most voters say they do make decisions based on polling. Roughly 55% of Americans say they would “definitely” go vote if the polls showed their preferred candidate far behind. Even among Republican midterm voters who say the polls underestimate their party, roughly 75% say the same.
“There are a lot of voters that are motivated to send a message to the system,” said longtime GOP strategist Kevin Madden. “I think particularly on the [political] right, they’ll be motivated to send a message, and essentially that message is ‘You’re wrong, and the voters are right.’”
The big question for campaigns is “are there enough of those?” he said.
