With Election Day less than three weeks away, Republicans are reportedly bracing for defeat in the House, with some in the party privately conceding that the chamber is already gone.
Should they?
The pessimism has a basis. Democrats have led in the polls for months, and history is rarely kind to the party that holds the White House in a midterm year. Of course, the picture is more complicated than the conventional wisdom suggests. Some polls have tightened, and Republicans are showing signs of viability in races they had no business being competitive in this late in the cycle.
That raises the biggest question of the campaign's final stretch: are the polls capturing the Republican vote at all?
NewsNation's Leland Vittert put that question to pollster Frank Luntz, citing ColdSpark interviews across five Pennsylvania Senate districts. Democrats who had voted in each of the last four elections showed up at 129% over quota. Republicans with the same voting record came in just 2% over.
"It says that the Democrats are participating, are prepared to participate, and that the Republicans, low-propensity voters, except in the presidential race, are still less likely to participate," Luntz told NewsNation.
The veteran pollster said Trump cuts both ways. "Donald Trump is magic to his voters," Luntz said. "When he speaks, they listen, and they don't hear anyone else. Here's the problem. He's also magic to people who don't like him, who are more likely to participate because they're thinking of him."
Pressed on whether Trump's visibility would really move voters who already dislike him, Luntz pointed to the energy on the left. "The Democrats are motivated," he said. "We've seen this in the primary campaigns and we've seen this now for the last seven, eight months, they are going to participate, they're following this, and for them, this election is actually 2028. It's their chance to vote against him, it's their chance to be heard, and they want to be, and they want to send a message to the White House that they don't like what they're seeing."
That's the core of the GOP's challenge. Trump's name won't appear on a single ballot this fall, and plenty of Republican voters treat that as permission to sit it out. Democrat voters see him on every line. A midterm becomes a referendum on the president, whether his own supporters treat it as one or not.
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Luntz then urged caution on the numbers that looked good for Republicans. Vittert noted a new poll showing independents favoring the GOP 45% to 40%, a 12-point gain in a single week. Luntz, who has run this kind of polling since 1994, said Republicans typically need 55% to 60% of independents to offset the Democrats’ turnout edge, and he warned that the sample was small. Then he turned that same skepticism on his own profession, recalling that he once expected Hillary Clinton to beat Trump in 2016.
"Be very careful about this," Luntz said. "I think a lot of pollsters are gonna look awfully stupid on Election Day because they're so out there with their projections."
When Vittert asked whether he meant the pollsters predicting a blue wave, Luntz agreed. And while he conceded Democrats hold an edge in both chambers, he saw a real opening for Republicans.
"But I'm telling you, Leland, there is a significant chance that the Republicans can recapture that vote because in the end, in 2024, in the last, let's say, 10 days, Republicans won Latino votes that they had never won before," he said. "They won union votes that they'd never won before. And they won younger males under age 30 like they'd never done before."
According to Luntz, Trump’s pitch to those voters should go something like, "Hold on, you may not like where we are right now, but they're much worse."
Are the pollsters undercounting Republicans? @FrankLuntz joins @LelandVittert https://t.co/OQxk84GLsX
— On Balance with Leland Vittert (@NewsNationOB) October 14, 2026
That's the logic behind Trump's late-campaign blitz. If the MAGA coalition treats this as an election that matters, the polls may prove to be based on incredibly wrong assumptions.
In the end, the GOP wins in November if Republican voters treat this as an election in which Trump is, indeed, on the ballot. And frankly, they should, because if Democrats win, the Trump agenda grinds to a halt.
