It's Judgment Day for Trump (and for pollsters)

Politics

It's Judgment Day for Trump (and for pollsters)

FLIPR’s final forecast is in. Here’s why I buy it — mostly.

Nate Silver

Nov 03, 2026

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Trump with Ken Paxton in Lubbock, Texas on Oct. 27. Paxton is one of the

underperforming candidates

who could cost Republicans the Senate. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

FLIPR’s

final forecasts

are ready for the

Senate

,

House

and

governorships

.

Since we’ve recently published some

very detailed analysis

of basically

every race that might matter

, I’m not going to go through them state-by-state. Our forecasts show good numbers for Democrats — the last round of polling

resolved any doubt about that

. They are reasonably clear favorites to flip the Senate, and very likely to flip the House. The Senate is by no means certain, but at the same time, the bottom could fall out for Republicans if Democrats meet or exceed their forecasts on a race-by-race basis. It would be a major surprise if Democrats failed to capture the House, along with various state legislatures and governorships, though some of the most important gubernatorial races like Texas and Florida are “Lean R” rather than the “Lean Ds” that are more typical in the Senate.

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Let’s take roughly three beats here:

Returning to

where we started when FLIPR launched

by considering the background conditions of the election and why they’re so perilous for Republicans — and, I’d argue, ultimately highly consistent with one another.

One more quick look at

polling error

, and why Democrats

might

be able to survive one in the Senate.

And then finally, we’ll try something slightly weirder. I’ll illustrate my “mental map” of the election, and why my

gut feels slightly conflicted

this time around.

But first, a quick word of appreciation. Whether you only come here for election peaks or you're an OG paid subscriber, thank you for following our coverage. Even as compared to 2024, this election has had a really strong finishing kick in the various metrics we track.

That’s probably just a reflection of the rhythm of the campaign, though. The most dramatic events of the election two years ago were front-loaded into the summer, and the stretch run was listless, with no presidential debates after Sept. 10. This election has felt more like a

typical wave

, with Democrats’ advantage

building over the course of the cycle

.

To some extent, this is the usual pattern in midterms. Instead of the back-and-forth that you can get in a presidential year, usually things just get continually worse for one party: Republicans in 2006 and again this year, or Democrats in 2010 and 2014, for instance. Sometimes, like in 1994 and 2014, the actual outcome ends up being even worse than the polls for the party that’s on the back foot. There aren’t many good examples of when the party that seemed to have momentum underperformed — you could sort of argue that for 2022 — though I’m not sure if that’s a durable pattern or something that just reflects small sample sizes.

The improvement in Democrats’ numbers hasn’t been particularly linear, with a sharp shift shortly after Labor Day, perhaps associated with

rising gas and diesel prices

. Democrats’ advantage on the

generic ballot

ramped up from roughly +6.5 to +9, and more or less stayed there. Though there has been some movement in individual states, and it’s mostly been favorable for Democrats, particularly in the Kansas, Michigan and Maine Senate races, and arguably Texas. Mary Peltola is possibly losing altitude in Alaska, conversely, and perhaps Josh Turek in Iowa, but overall this has been a good trade for Democrats, and they’re closing the cycle at their highs in FLIPR.

Republicans have a lot of problems, but there’s one common cause: Trump

We’re long past the days when putting “Trump” in a headline would guarantee you a million clicks, but I wonder if we’ve been overcompensating by not talking about him enough. Because just take one more look at that 2026 generic ballot chart and compare it to this:

That’s pretty close to a one-for-one match with the generic ballot, although there has been an uptick in Trump’s approval rating over the past few days even though neither the generic ballot nor state-by-state polls have really improved for Republicans. I do think that offers a glimmer of hope for the GOP: maybe their voters are coming home.

Still, there’s not an inherent mismatch. If Trump’s net approval ratings are -20, then our formula based on all midterms since 1948 would peg the national environment at D +9 — which is exactly what the generic ballot shows. That’s also similar to Democrats’

+8.6-point margin

in the House popular vote in 2018, the previous Trump midterm.

There’s just a lot of data that points toward that D +8 or D +9 range, but also a sizable minority of polls, some with strong pollster ratings like NYT/Siena and AtlasIntel, that show a further breakthrough for Democrats, reaching into the double digits in the national vote.

I can’t get 2018 out of my head. I’m not saying it’s Democrats’ floor: FLIPR clearly disagrees with that, in fact. Its projection of the House popular vote, which is

slightly different and more conservative

than its generic ballot estimate, is D +7.9.

But in 2018, we weren’t at war with Iran. Gas

cost about $2.70 a gallon

, not $4.20. Trump was 72 years old, not 80. He hadn’t broken his promises on the Epstein files. He was a

bit

closer to being a true populist and spent less time hanging out in the company of highly

unpopular billionaires

. AI wasn’t a thing that people had all this anxiety about, and Trump hadn’t positioned himself on the

wrong side of a supermajority

on data centers. And the Republican Party had more holdovers from the pre-Trump era: more John Cornyns, fewer Ken Paxtons.

All

of these problems are Trump’s fault. He almost seems to have a death wish in these midterms. And the one superpower he has — turning out low-propensity voters in presidential years, the sorts of voters who apparently are often missed by pollsters — has never really worked when Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot. Nor is his base as loyal as you might assume. Only 20 percent of voters

strongly

approve of his performance in office. (And almost half strongly disapprove.) The recent slight improvement in his numbers has mostly been weak disapprovers shifting back into the weak approval category, something that can happen as elections approach and people get into more of a partisan mindset.

It’s not just the polls, though. Republicans are

barely mentioning Trump

in their ads. Conservative podcasters

aren’t talking about him either

. Fox News’s ratings are

reportedly in decline

. And yet, Trump insists on making himself the star of the show, when most presidents in his position would keep a lower profile. I don’t think this was the main cause, but it’s ironic that the big swing toward Democrats in the polls came basically immediately after his “midterm convention.” Some pollsters

have even expressed a concern

that, because he has become so unpopular, voters are lying about never having supported Trump when they did. If so, polls that weight toward past vote recall could be overrating Republicans by a point or two, by miscounting Trump voters in the Harris or “other” columns.

What do Republicans have going for them? It’s really not much.

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