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This won’t come as huge news to most. But I’m getting asked about it a lot: can the polls be wrong? What do you think?

So let me put an answer here. They can obviously be wrong and you should be prepared for them to be wrong. If you’re running a campaign or SuperPAC, they can give you intel about where to deploy resources. If you’re just observing, they’re more about human nature and anxiety management. But whether you get excited or pushed into despair, we’ll know the actual results in about six weeks. Watch them or don’t. It’ll will be fine either way. There are no poll hubris gods. They can’t strike you down.

Let’s talk specifics.

The polls we’re seeing now are almost certainly directionally accurate. But they could be overshooting on their margins, which are quite large now. If they are we should expect to see that most in red states. (Even for someone like me who’s been bullish about this midterm cycle since mid-2025, some of these numbers are hard to believe.) States have partisan muscle memory that polls can miss. So for instance, yesterday Sabato’s Crystal Ball changed the Kansas Senate race from Likely Republican to Leans Republican, an astonishing development. The polls there are pretty close given that it’s Kansas, and the most recent, an Emerson poll, has Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton up by 1 point. But this is a classic case where you have to weigh a substantial amount of GOP muscle memory into the equation. Polls can miss that, or it can simply mean that undecideds break heavily for the state’s dominant party. To be clear, if I were a Kansas Democrat canvassing I’d be pretty pumped right now. A win is possible. But this is the cautious/realistic way to look at it. The same applies to the handful of other seemingly competitive races in deep red states.