Steve Kornacki said Democrats held a nine-point lead on the generic ballot, but he warned that the polling picture still carries a wildcard possibility. The lead points to a strong night for Democrats. The risk is that Republican and pro-Trump voters could again be undercounted.
Kornacki on Tuesday
On Tuesday, Savannah Guthrie asked him, “How do you analyze that as we’re going into Election Day?” Kornacki answered that Democrats could see “a very big night,” then immediately added that the Trump-era polling record still complicates the forecast.
“There are reasons why the polls could be correct—and this could be a very big night for Democrats,” he said. “But, like you said, in the Trump era in particular, we’ve seen these elections where the polls haven’t just missed—they’ve missed badly.”
Republican and pro-Trump voters
His caution focused on one recurring problem: polls have missed Republican and pro-Trump voters “badly,” especially in states like Iowa and Ohio. He said pollsters are getting a lot more responses from Democrats than Republicans in these surveys, and pollsters are trying ways to correct for that imbalance.
“And they’ve missed in a specific way in the Trump era: they’ve missed Republican voters, pro-Trump voters, especially in states like some of these battleground states, Iowa and Ohio, some of these Midwest states,” he said. “Some things that pollsters are telling us right now is that they are getting a lot more responses from Democrats than Republicans in these polls.”
Gallup, -NORC and the economy
The warning landed with voters already focused on the economy. Gallup found that 50 percent of voters view it as an “extremely important” issue, while -NORC found that 85 percent ranked the economy as their top issue and 84 percent said the cost of living was their second-biggest concern. Those numbers help explain why the polling debate matters going into Election Day and midterm voting.
The tension is simple enough: the polls show Democrats ahead by nine points, but Kornacki’s warning says that Trump-era undercounting could still bend the result in the opposite direction. Nate Silver added that it would be a “major surprise” if Democrats do not win back control of the House, and his FLIPR model gave Democrats an 80 percent chance of flipping enough seats to seize the Senate. Whether the polling imbalance actually changes Election Day is the part nobody can settle before the votes are counted.
