Democrats have posted double-digit or near-double-digit leads on the national generic congressional ballot for months, and many people predict the 2026 midterms will be huge for Democrats as a result. I’ve been rather bullish about the GOP’s chances this year, and it’s not just wishful thinking. I think the socialist uprising is going to hurt Democrats more than the polls are showing right now.
And the polls do show that Democrats have a significant advantage. The RealClearPolitics average has Democrats up 8.6 points nationally. RMG Research puts the Democrat edge at six points. Fox News has it at seven. Big Data Poll, the most bullish of the bunch, shows Democrats ahead by 12.
The problem is that each of those numbers comes from a national survey, and control of Congress has never been decided nationally. Even presidential elections aren't decided by the national popular vote; they're decided state by state, through the Electoral College. Most of us who cover polling for a living know this instinctively, and dismiss national presidential polls almost on sight and go straight to the state-level numbers, because that's where the election is actually fought and won.
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It's worth asking why the generic congressional ballot doesn't get the same treatment. Control of the House runs through a few dozen competitive districts. This cycle, control of the Senate runs through a small number of battleground states. Polling every individual House race would be prohibitively expensive. But polling the generic ballot state by state, at least in the states that matter most, might be a far more honest way to gauge where this election is actually headed.
That's essentially what the Peter G. Peterson Foundation did in August.
The foundation surveyed 2,500 registered voters across five states likely to decide control of the U.S. Senate: Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. The poll, conducted Aug. 20-27, found nothing resembling a Democrat wave. On the generic congressional ballot, it's a statistical tie, 47% for Democrats and 46% for Republicans.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
Democrats lead the generic ballot in three of the five states. Republicans lead in two. In Georgia, Democrats hold a narrow edge, 48% to 46%. In Michigan, Democrats are up 47% to 44%. In North Carolina, the Democrat lead widens slightly to 49% to 45%. In Ohio, though, Republicans are ahead, 46% to 45%. And in Texas, Republicans lead by five points, 49% to 44%. All these leads are basically within the margin of error.
Now, here’s where I still start asking questions.
Donald Trump won both Ohio and Texas by double digits in 2024. He won Michigan by just 1.5 points. Are we supposed to believe that the GOP is barely ahead in reliably red states while an actual swing state like Michigan is also similarly tight?
Something in that picture doesn't add up.
On top of that, separate polling from Minnesota shows its Senate race is competitive too, another data point suggesting Republicans are running stronger this cycle than the national headlines let on.
I'm no professional pollster. But the deeper I look at the state-level numbers, the less I believe the blue-wave narrative that's been driving so much midterm coverage. Republicans have a solid chance of holding both the House and the Senate this November.
The fix is simple. A single national number tells you how people feel about Washington in the abstract. A poll of the states will actually give you a better picture of where the election may land. An 8.6-point Democrat advantage nationally sounds ominous for Republicans, until you see that the same voters, polled in the five states that matter most, are functionally tied.
