Why Midterm Polls May Be Missing a Hidden Voter Surge

On a late-September drive through the Georgia countryside, the only spectacle that competed with the seemingly limitless fields of peanuts and soybeans was the sheer number of political signs.

Campaign messages covered barn siding, lined rural roads, leaned beside driveways and stretched along wire fences in signs, banners and homemade posters of every imaginable size.

The level of voter engagement is hardly surprising in what could become one of the most consequential midterm elections in a generation. More revealing, however, was the clear preference expressed by many of those voters for a particular party and candidate.

Georgia, often called the Empire State of the South, has chosen Republican governors for more than 20 years. Yet the abundance of “Vote for Keisha Lance Bottoms” signs suggests that long-standing political pattern may be approaching a dramatic shift.

My reporting trip through the Deep South, including stops in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, followed the route of a journey I made two years earlier before the 2024 presidential election. That earlier trip helped shape an article I published on this website in October 2024.

That assessment ran against the prevailing polls and political commentary, which portrayed the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as a razor-close race. The final result proved otherwise.

I predicted that a largely undetected wave of Trump supporters—voters pollsters had failed to identify—would rally behind him, much as hidden support helped Ronald Reagan in 1980. That prediction came true, and Trump secured a decisive Electoral College victory.

This time, many polls and pundits again appear to be missing the broader reality taking shape in small-town America, on Main Streets and inside factories—although the apparent polling tilt now points in the opposite political direction.

I am skeptical of opinion polling despite having formal training as a pollster, including a doctorate focused on research methodology, statistics and probability. Early in my career, I worked as a project director for President Reagan’s polling operation. That experience showed me why surveys cannot be conducted effectively from behind a desk alone—and how easily their findings can be distorted.

Those challenges have only intensified in the years since.

With mainstream news organizations operating on tighter budgets, some of the best-funded polling firms have turned to partisan sponsors for financial support. The danger is obvious: findings can begin to reflect the interests of those paying for the research rather than the views of the electorate.

Social media platforms and political influencers then magnify those survey results. Because many influencers are backed by competing political or commercial interests, the public can be left with an even more distorted picture of voter sentiment.

Even sound surveys offer only a momentary snapshot of public opinion. They capture where voters stand at one particular point, but not how quickly attitudes are shifting or how intense their enthusiasm may be. Those changes are easier to detect through open-ended conversations with live interviewers—an approach that is costly and increasingly uncommon.

For this analysis, I have gone beyond polling and spoken directly with voters, particularly the roughly 10 percent who move between the two major parties. They include auto mechanics, motel clerks, restaurant workers, small-business owners, truckers and farmers—working-class white, Black and Hispanic Americans whose choices can decide elections.

Those swing voters helped deliver Trump’s victory over Harris. The coalition Ronald Reagan first assembled has since become a central pillar of Trump’s reshaped Republican Party.

I began in Toccoa, in northeastern Georgia, a community widely viewed as Trump country. There, I spoke with drugstore employees and warehouse workers who had voted for the president three times.

Some of those same voters now say they are considering backing Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator seeking another term against former Congressman Mike Collins.

Across the Georgia communities I visited—from the North Carolina border west toward Alabama—residents repeatedly raised the same concerns: the rising cost of food and gasoline, and especially the sharp increase in diesel prices, a vital expense for farmers and ranchers.

I spoke with a woman who owned a 4,000-acre soybean ranch. Between Trump’s tariffs and spiking fuel costs, she got fed up and sold the land that had been in her family for generations. She, too, had previously voted Trump three times. Now she’s ‘independent.’

Even if these folks don’t ultimately vote Democratic, they’ll likely stay home and not cast a ballot – the political ‘kiss of death’ for any party.

Most polls have Ossoff winning by eight percentage points or more in his re-election. In a state that Trump won by over two points in 2024, that’s significant.

Now comes the tricky part: The race for governor between Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms and businessman Rick Jackson is tight. A good poll that I trust has this contest basically tied, but I think momentum is moving against anything labeled GOP, so I place my bet on Bottoms for governor.

It may seem anecdotal, but when signage for one party outflanks the other party by 50 to one, it’s no longer strictly descriptive, it’s a data point.

The story for the Republicans only gets worse in South Carolina. I stopped in Walhalla in the northwest corner of the state and spoke to an elderly couple outside a grocery store on a Saturday morning.

They, along with the barista who made my coffee, were fans of the late Lindsey Graham, a local political legend and a friend of mine. Trump backed Graham’s sister Darline Graham Nordone in her run for her brother’s open seat this November and she won. But, in the eyes of the folks that I spoke to, she is not in the same league as Lindsey.

They told me that they are staying home this coming Election Day. And while they can’t stomach voting for a Democrat, they would have rather seen Republican Congressman Ralph Norman, Darline Graham Nordone’s challenger in the GOP primary, get the nod from Trump.

One South Carolina political guru, pollster and friend of mine has Nordone up by a mere point over her Democratic challenger. In a state that Trump won by nearly 18 percentage points that is a flashing red alarm. If Nordone wins, it will be by a whisker.

While I don’t base my forecasts on polling alone, as Bob Dylan sang: You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Even a broken weathervane will spin in a hurricane and even mediocre polls with a decent sample size can detect a trend line.

My swing through western North Carolina offered no solace for the GOP, either. I know this region well, having done business from Hickory to Charlotte as a CEO in a previous life.

Nominally conservative, it is usually Republican, but trending purple in recent years, especially around Charlotte. Now, that blue vein has gotten thicker.

Like Georgia, North Carolina is illustrative as a national bellwether. Both states are becoming more Democratic, but the speed of this transition is startling.

The 2026 midterms and, indeed, nearly all of US politics, have become intensely nationalized.

Former Democratic governor Roy Cooper currently enjoys a commanding lead over Republican challenger former GOP chair Michael Whatley in the Senate race. Trump’s margin of victory in North Carolina in 2024 was over three points, so it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see the GOP erosion in this state – and don’t even get me started on Texas.

I didn’t travel to the Lone Star State on this trip, but the signs there are patently obvious.

Republican Senate candidate, Ken Paxton is in deep trouble, as Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico is building what I see as a small but consistent lead, even though GOP-influenced polls say otherwise.

What Trump did in the 2024 election was impressive, if not legendary, by appealing to the needs of working-class Americans of all ethnic stripes, who saw a future for themselves and their children under the GOP.

Their hope was that the President would focus on the economy with laser-like intensity and, at the time, many of these people told me they would crawl over broken glass to vote for him.

No more.

I believe the Republican Party under Trump has now lost the narrative among these voters who formed the new GOP coalition.

Whether these folks are simply on hiatus from the new Republican coalition or have left the tent for good remains to be seen.