What Are the Polls Telling Us About the 2026 Midterm Elections

A Rutgers polling expert explains how to make sense of survey results ahead of Nov. 3

With the 2026 midterm elections just days away, voters are seeing a steady stream of polls measuring everything from which party Americans want to control Congress to the outlook in closely contested House and other top issues shaping the race.

But how much can those numbers tell us about what will happen on Election Day?

Ashley Koning, assistant research professor and director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University, explains what voters should know as they make sense of the latest polls.

How much confidence should voters have in election polls heading into the 2026 midterms, and what should they understand about what polls can and can't tell us?

Polls aren't meant to predict election outcomes. A poll is a snapshot in time: It tells us how people feel when they're interviewed, and it can only reflect what the people it reaches tell us. During an election, who votes and how they vote can keep shifting right up through Election Day. Likely voters are an unknown population until the votes are counted, so every pre-election poll is making its best guess about who will turn out.

That said, the record is better than people think. Midterm polling has been quite solid in recent cycles. The bigger misses came when Donald Trump was on the ballot and Democratic support was overestimated. Pollsters have also kept refining their methods, from voter file samples to weighting by education and recalled past vote.

So credible polling-pre-election or otherwise-that is transparent and follows best practices deserves to be trusted as long as we understand what it's meant to do and the inherent statistical uncertainty that comes with it.

National polls often measure which party voters want to control Congress. How much does that generic ballot number really tell us when individual House and Senate races can look very different?

National polls on the generic ballot tell us the ideological mood of the country, and that's genuinely useful. They show which way the wind is blowing, especially when read alongside the president's approval rating, since the president's party typically loses ground in a midterm. But a national number doesn't directly translate into a seat count of Congress. Individual races are shaped by incumbency, candidate quality, local issues and how district lines are drawn, and plenty of voters split their tickets.

New Jersey's 7th District is a good example. Trump won it narrowly in 2024, yet Mikie Sherrill won it the following year in the governor's race. The same is true in a presidential year when the national popular vote matters far less than the handful of states that decide the Electoral College.

That's why credible state and district-level polling is so important -and why the decline of independent public interest polling at that level is a real loss for voters.

New Jersey's 7th District is one of the most closely watched House races in the nation. What makes a competitive district hard to poll, and what should voters keep in mind when they see polls from campaigns or advocacy groups?

What makes any race hard to poll is that we simply don't know who is going to turn out until the end of Election Day, and that's even harder to gauge in nonpresidential years.

Congressional districts add another layer. They're smaller geographies, so samples are smaller and margins of error larger. District lines also cut across counties and towns, so pollsters usually have to sample from the voter file. And in a small electorate, a modest change in who shows up can swing the result in a way that tends to even out statewide.

On top of that, polling is incredibly expensive these days, largely because of declining response rates, so you rarely see public polls of House races unless they're highly competitive -and even then, only a handful. Siena, including its work with The New York Times, and Emerson College are among the few that regularly poll individual districts. That leaves very few polls to average together and opens the door for campaign and advocacy polls to fill the gap. Even when those polls use credible methods, the public usually sees only the results that show the sponsor's preferred candidate in the best light.

What should voters be paying attention to in the final polls?

It's in those final days and weeks that undecided voters typically make up their minds-though in today's highly polarized political climate, many voters likely chose their sides long ago.

That means the late movement usually comes from a relatively small group, but in a close race, that group can decide the outcome. Shifts in who actually turns out matter just as much, which is why polls taken a few weeks out can look different from the final result. Early voting and vote-by-mail add another wrinkle, since a large share of the electorate has already cast a ballot by the time the last polls come out.

In these final polls, watch any trends across several surveys rather than one single result. Look at how many voters are still undecided and how enthusiastic each side's voters are.

Remember, polls aren't meant to be crystal balls. They are simply taking a pulse in a moment in time that very well may change based on who does or does not turn out by Election Day.

What's your quick checklist for telling whether a poll is reliable?

This matters more than ever this cycle. Wedgewood Polls recently admitted that most of its surveys were fabricated, and those numbers had already reached news coverage and polling averages before anyone caught on.

Here's what I look for to be a good consumer of data: Always know if it's a real pollster. Does it have named staff, a record, and published methods? Always know who paid for the poll. Campaign and advocacy polls aren't automatically wrong, but they're usually released because they help the sponsor.

Always know who the poll talked to. All adults, registered voters and likely voters are different groups - and "likely voters" are the pollster's best guess at who will turn out. Always know how the poll was conducted. Field dates, how people were reached, sample size, and margin of error should all be published.

Always know how the questions were asked. A pollster should always publish the exact question text. If you don't know anything about the wording, you don't know anything about the resulting public opinion.

Know where to check. The American Association for Public Opinion Research, the American Association of Survey Research Organizations, and the Roper Center at Cornell University are good places to vet a pollster and Pew Research Center explains how polls work.