WASHINGTON — With the midterm elections days away, the president of Pew Research Center is cautioning Americans not to treat any one survey as a forecast, arguing that 2026 combines old polling problems with several new ones.
Pew president Michael Dimock said in an analysis posted Thursday that surveys remain good at measuring attitudes and candidate preference but have always struggled to predict who will actually vote. People tend to describe what they intend to do rather than what they will do, and that gap widens in midterms, where turnout is lower and races turn on local issues.
He pointed to a crowded field of cheap online opt-in polls that has grown as high-quality polling has become more expensive and less common. Many of those polls do not explain their methods, and researchers have documented fake respondents, from bot farms to people answering for pay, slipping into the samples. Dimock said that problem distorts results for Hispanic and young adults in particular.
He flagged three new complications this year: synthetic surveys that use artificial intelligence to model answers instead of asking real people, along with polls circulated without disclosure that are simply made up; uncertainty over mail voting, new election laws and fears of intimidation; and artificial intelligence and data centers emerging as issues that have not yet split cleanly along party lines. Midcycle redistricting has also left voters less sure who is on their ballot, and fewer incumbents are running than in any general election since 1992.
His advice to readers is to avoid leaning on a single poll, distrust outliers and ask who paid for a survey, whether it reached real people and whether its methods are public.
Public confidence in the election process itself has slipped as well. A Pew survey of 3,554 adults taken July 6-12 found 55% confident the midterms will be run fairly and accurately, compared with 61% before the 2024 election and 64% in 2022. Two-thirds, 66%, said they were confident every citizen who wants to vote will be able to.
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