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Expectations within the Democratic Party are growing ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, which will be a political watershed.
Current President Trump, a Republican, is recording an unprecedentedly low approval rating in history, and voters are dissatisfied with increases in food and utility bills. In addition, the results of public opinion polls over the past few months predict that the Democratic Party will achieve good results in the election on the 3rd (local time).
According to several opinion polls, the Democratic Party has a lead in far more seats than the 218 seats needed to secure a majority in the lower house of Congress. Even in major Senate districts, approval ratings were found to be similar or slightly ahead.
For example, according to a recent New York Times poll, the approval ratings of candidates from both parties are currently close in the 2024 Senate election in South Carolina, where Trump won by an 18 percentage point margin. Additionally, a recent CNN survey showed that Democrats are ahead in Texas, Kansas, and Maine.
So, are these opinion poll results accurate?
In recent American political history, there are many cases where even opinion polls conducted just a few days before voting day were wrong. President Trump achieved results that exceeded previous predictions when he was elected in 2016 and 2024. Although he lost by a narrow margin in the 2020 presidential election, most opinion polls at the time predicted that Democratic candidate Joe Biden would comfortably win.
Earlier this year, opinion polls predicted that Democratic candidate Abdul El Sayed would win Michigan's Democratic Senate race by a double-digit margin. However, the actual difference in vote percentage was only 1%p. In the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin, a candidate whose approval rating was nearly 20 percentage points higher than that of his rival in public opinion polls actually lost by a narrow margin of less than 0.1%.
Clifford Young, president of Ipsos Public Affairs, a political and market research organization, explained that public opinion polls have become more difficult in recent years as Americans' use of landlines has decreased and call response rates have also decreased. It is also said that even when contacted, the number of people participating in the survey has decreased significantly.
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“Conservatives, especially those on the far right, inherently have a strong antipathy toward the established system,” he said, adding, “Moreover, they do not want to participate in any activities. They hate the current system. So it is difficult (to understand their opinions).”
If the voices of Republican voters are not properly counted, and if pollsters do not take them into account in their voting outcome prediction models, the data could be biased in favor of the Democratic Party.
This is one of the reasons why it has become difficult for opinion polling organizations to predict actual voter sentiment.
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One of the reasons why President Trump performed better than expected in the last presidential election was because more of his supporters, who normally do not participate in voting, flocked to polling places than expected.
This unpredictability is one of the reasons why even recent major reliable public opinion polls differed from the actual election results, even though the margin of error was only a few percentage points. In a close game, a few percentage points can determine victory or defeat.
And now, in many key Senate districts, the gap in approval ratings between candidates is only a few percentage points.
However, midterm election polls have been relatively more accurate in recent years. This is partly because President Trump, who boasts an unrivaled ability to lead dissatisfied American voters to the polls, did not run in person.
In a 2022 opinion poll, despite President Biden's low approval rating at the time, the Democratic Party was expected to avoid a crushing defeat in the election, contrary to previous expectations.
In fact, the Democratic Party lost its majority position in the House of Representatives, but the difference in seats was not large, and it maintained its majority position in the Senate.
Of course, this year's primaries produced results that exceeded previous predictions, but President Young explained that the results of primaries have always been difficult to predict, and voters have a stronger tendency to make decisions at the last minute.
Therefore, the explanation is that we should not hastily take this as a signal that the current midterm election polls will be wrong.
In U.S. history, the ruling party's poor performance in midterm elections is common.
The most notable example in recent years was 2010, when the Republican Party, then the opposition party, recaptured more than 60 seats in the House of Representatives and increased the number of seats in the Senate.
At the time, the U.S. economy was struggling to recover from a financial crisis, and conservatives were raising concerns about President Obama's health care reform. Accordingly, the Democratic Party was expected to lose in the opinion polls, but it was a bigger defeat than expected.
And this time, the situation is reversed, the Democratic Party is the opposition party, and voters are paying most attention to economic issues.
However, even considering President Trump's low approval rating, there are some reasons to predict that the Democratic Party may not achieve as good results as expected.
First, most of the close battlegrounds in this election are places where Trump easily won in the presidential election just two years ago. It's like the Republican Party's home game.
Additionally, changes in House constituency districts over the years have reduced the movement of seats between political parties.
Third, as national polarization deepened, the number of floating voters decreased. Accordingly, some experts say that the voter base has become entrenched.
Additionally, the Republican Party's enormous financial power allowed it to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into offensive advertising in the final weeks of the election.
Opinion polling companies try to capture changing fundamental factors, and well-designed polls can even anticipate issues that could undermine trust.
There is always bound to be statistical uncertainty in each opinion poll due to the margin of error, that is, the difference in sample size compared to the total population. Therefore, the average of multiple opinion poll results may be more accurate than a single opinion poll.
For now, even if there is a bias in the opinion polls seen in the recent presidential election, it seems highly likely that the Democratic Party will achieve good results in the midterm elections on November 3.
Additionally, inaccuracy in opinion polls can go both ways. In last year's state and by-elections, far more supporters showed up at the polls than expected, and the Democratic Party achieved results that surpassed most opinion polls.
And the Democratic Party's expectations may have been heightened by the fact that President Trump campaigned in the final stages of the election even in states where he won a landslide victory in the 2024 presidential election. This is because even in internal Republican opinion polls, it could be a sign that Republican candidates are struggling.
But voters may change their minds by Election Day.
Sometimes, unexpected events occur at the end of the campaign period and can change the outcome of the campaign. In addition, it also happens that the floating class, which still accounts for a significant portion of the electorate, all leans to one side.
Opinion polls always involve some degree of uncertainty, and the ability to manage and deal with this is more of an art than a science.
President Young concluded by saying, “I think we are doing well, but the problem is not simply with the polling agency. One of the causes of the problem is that we are dealing with people. People are not easy beings.”
