Democrats might do very well in November

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There's a lot of speculation around how the Democrats might do in the midterm elections, and the polls aren't always clarifying. Some polls show a D+4 environment, and some show a D+11 situation. That's the difference between Democrats doing relatively well and a landslide victory.

It's expected that Democrats will retake the House, but we don't know by how much. They may also take the Senate, which is a more difficult goal. I decided it'd be helpful to call up an expert to get a sense of what's really happening here.

Michael McDonald is a professor of political science at the University of Florida, and he's an elections expert. He says Democrats are almost certainly going to do better than what the more conservative polls are showing.

"I don't think we're in a D+4 environment. We're at least in a 2018 environment, which was around D+7," McDonald tells me. "When you start looking at all of the actual elections that have occurred and the data that we have from that, we continue to see that there's good evidence that something at least like 2018 would be in the cards for 2026."

McDonald says some of the pollsters may be operating under false assumptions. For instance, they may be assuming the electorate in 2026 will look similar to the electorate in 2024. That's probably not going to be the case.

"Lots of different indicators and conditions have changed since 2024," McDonald says.

Elections that took place in 2025, such as the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, showed us that Democrats were significantly outperforming what the polls showed. McDonald says that might happen again.

"This does suggest that the pollsters haven't caught up with reality, and the electorate may not be as pro-Republican as they may think," McDonald says.

Pollsters weigh the responses of voters based on numerous factors, and then they reach their result, and they could be making some mistakes there. McDonald says he's trying to look at more definitive data to get a better picture of what's happening.

"I look at the early vote and other administrative data," he says. "We look at actual election results and precinct results, and we look at the patterns of voting that we're seeing... It's not about statistical sampling and weighting."

There's been a major fight over redistricting across the country this year, and it looked like Republicans had gained an edge in the battle over the House because of it. However, the changes they made could end up backfiring, because they made them under the assumption that they still had the support of the voters they won in 2024.

"It looks like some of the districts that the Republicans gerrymandered could, in this political environment, fall to the Democrats," McDonald says. "Some of that has to do with Hispanics. The one group that has moved very strongly against Republicans since 2024 is Hispanics."