Why the polls are so good for Democrats, and what’s really happening.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that also wasn’t at the Hawks game in February 2024. That’s another misunderstanding: We were hawking game, as we like to make a little cash on the side selling rare meats.

How much politics happened this week? We’ll put it like this: On a scale from 1 to 10, it was a … 5.5 or 6, probably. Both chambers of Congress have departed D.C. through Election Day, which means they have to spend more time with their annoying constituents and their incessant, whiny demands. Hang in there, candidates.

We’ve already made fun of Eric Schmitt in this edition, and we will continue to do so later on, because it’s rare that someone is caught so red-handed being a dope. Plus, we look at Donald Trump’s campaign travel schedule, which is light on places where there are competitive campaigns and heavy on the few pockets of the country where he can rest assured crowds will be nice to him.

But first, the polls. They have reached such a point of goodness for Democrats that we are compelled to ask: Is something fishy going on?

What matters now: Are the polls for Democrats too good to be true?

Last week, we wrote about how the situation was becoming so dire for Republicans that they were hustling to defend states like Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. We instantly felt ashamed of ourselves. A core mission of this newsletter is to accelerate debilitating and unproductive anxiety in Democratic readers, not to make them optimistic.

So in this edition, after another week of Democratic candidates showing double-digit leads in generic ballot polling and posting more whopping leads in every battleground across the map, we’re exploring a more on-brand topic: What if the polls are overstating Democrats’ position?

We asked veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake if any red flags jumped out at her from the public polls showing Democrats essentially leading every race across the country by 100-point margins. She mentioned two things.

First, that “these polls assume young people are going to turn out at record-high levels,” but that “I haven’t seen enough investment to make sure that’s true.” Young people have moved sharply away from Trump since 2024, which makes sense: The biggest issue in the country is the cost of living, and young people have no money. And young people could turn out at record levels. But expecting young people to turn out at record levels is a famously risky proposition in electoral politics.

Second, she said, was that most of these polls show “depressed Republican turnout,” a problem that Republicans—who have a serious financial advantage over Democrats this cycle—are spending unlimited sums of cash to amend.

In sum: These recent, dramatic numbers are “driven by two things: a blue surge and a red drag,” she said. “And I think both may be overestimated.”

When polling has underestimated Republican energy in the Trump era, there’s a common cause: Pollsters aren’t successfully reaching enough white non-college voters relative to college-plus voters. Since red states like Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas have relatively higher numbers of white non-college voters, the error there will be greater if pollsters are missing this cohort again.

Odder yet is how Democrats’ vast improvement in red states hasn’t been met with a similar polling surge(™) by Democratic Senate candidates in certain blue states, like Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota or Chris Pappas in New Hampshire.

“I just see warning signs of that with this idea that it looks like the Republicans are running stronger in the blue states, the Democrats are running stronger in the red states, and I tend to think that just doesn’t materialize,” Patrick Ruffini, the Republican pollster and founding partner of Echelon Insights, told us. “The fundamentals are going to end up mattering a lot more than we are maybe thinking right now.”

The polls aren’t directionally wrong. The president has a 38 percent approval rating, and voters think both he and the economy suck. It’s just a question of how good a Democratic year it will be after Republicans spend a billion dollars this month arguing that Democrats are communists who want to turn boys into girls. Ruffini’s latest poll, for example, had Democrats leading the generic ballot by 8 points. In a world like that, Democrats retake the House, flip a North Carolina Senate seat and maybe one or two more, but fall a few points short in various red-state Senate seats that Democrats began to fantasize about around Labor Day. That’s an outcome many Democrats would have locked in if they were asked a year ago. But it’s one that may come as a disappointment after the pollsters—those teases—got their hopes up about, like, Kansas.

We’ll note, though, that a polling error underestimating Republicans in the Trump era is typically a phenomenon when Trump is on the ballot. In the 2018 midterms, the polls were roughly accurate; in last year’s off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, polls significantly underestimated Democrats. We’re coming awfully close here to giving Democrats hope again, so we’d better stop. But if the polls are underestimating Democrats … watch out.

What we’re monitoring: Trump’s unusual campaign schedule.

Good news, Republican candidates: The president is here to help. The big guy will be all over the map this month helping get Republicans across the finish line. And this week he kicked off his tour of the nation by campaigning in … Alabama and Oklahoma? Where there are maybe one or two distantly competitive races between the two states? What’s going on here?

It’s not as if Alabama and Oklahoma GOP candidates are in some secret danger that we’re unaware of. (Although maybe they are? That’s what being “unaware” would mean.) It’s more that these are the only sorts of places that will have him. Few Republicans in actually swingy districts want Trump’s company on the trail, so Mobile it is.

Trump does have some trips to real, competitive states on the books. This weekend, he’s visiting Ohio, where Sen. Jon Husted, God bless him, has chosen to be in attendance despite trailing in public polls to ex-Sen. Sherrod Brown. Trump is planning a trek to Alaska soon too. But for the remainder of the month, these trips to America’s reddest ZIP codes might be more of the norm. That may just be all he can do, and it’s not a complete waste of everyone’s time. He has an important role to play in firing up the third of the country that still likes him, and national television audiences don’t care where the rally is held. Might as well do it from Alabama, where there’ll always be an enthusiastic crowd for Trump and there’s no local race to harm.

What broke new frontiers in congressional hearing humiliation: Learning the hard way that women play basketball too.

It’s been a minute since we’ve seen something so avoidably dumb as Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s performance in the Judiciary Committee hearing with former prosecutor Jack Smith this week. To briefly recap: Schmitt claimed he had texts proving that Smith was in Atlanta for a Hawks NBA game in February 2024, the day after Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis “came clean” about her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. His gotcha was that this must mean that Smith had been there to collude with Willis about their lawfare plans. Smith denied this, and Schmitt grinned as if he’d just effectively locked Smith in jail forever on perjury charges. The truth, as was discovered in short order, was that Smith had gone to see the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team (and star Caitlin Clark) at the University of Maryland that day.

The only point we’d like to make about this is that, however much flak Schmitt is getting for this—and it’s quite a bit—it’s not enough. There is no point at which the dragging of Schmitt for this performance would turn excessive. Here we have someone hiding behind the speech or debate clause to commit straightforward slander that his own staff reportedly warned him about. And in service of what? To please his 38-ass-percent-approval-rating party boss via an attempted perjury trap against someone Trump doesn’t like for having investigated his crimes. Not only is it pathetic; it’s downright—and we don’t use this word lightly—uncouth. Churlish, even. Best of luck in the 2028 veepstakes, senator.

More tales from America’s seedy political underbelly …

●     We can finally stop asking about whether the GOP will bail on the North Carolina Senate race, because it has now bailed: Senate Republicans’ super PAC has canceled its remaining ad reservations. At the same time, it’s moved much of that money into the Kansas Senate race. Maybe the polls are right?? (THE POLLS LIE!)

●     Don’t say he doesn’t have a heart, because Trump is attempting to play Santa Claus for various Republicans he has put in dire circumstances. This week, he announced a new steel plant in Iowa, a state where Republicans are in trouble because of basically every decision Trump has made as president. There’s also a $54 billion investment from Korea for a natural gas pipeline in Alaska, where Sen. Dan Sullivan is struggling to win reelection. Now, there are still some t’s to cross and i’s to dot. For example, the Iowa project hasn’t actually been approved, and the Koreans were surprised to hear that they had committed $54 billion for a pipeline project in Alaska. But other than that, everything’s basically good to go.

●      Please STOP SAYING that Trump isn’t doing what the American people elected him to do. The No. 1 issue on Americans’ minds in the 2024 election was that President Richard Nixon got a raw deal in the Watergate scandal, and that the Justice Department should work to clear his name. The Trump administration is simply responding to that overwhelming national mandate. (But seriously, this line in the Wall Street Journal story really got us: “Trump has asked former Nixon aides on several occasions why Nixon resigned rather than fight it out.” The answer to this inquiry would be because leaders of his own party informed Nixon that he would be removed from office if he didn’t resign. Trump doesn’t need to worry about such uprisings from his party.)

●      It sure seems as if Trump is preparing to escalate the Iran war just after polls close on Election Day, when he doesn’t have to worry about the political effects of a fresh spike in oil prices or headlines about how he is escalating the Iran war. We dunno, could be something to monitor.

●      The Senate reached a deal on permitting reform this week that it intends to take up during the lame-duck session. The grand bargain at its center is that Republicans get to eliminate legal red tape for new projects, while Democrats will have an easier time building out clean energy projects. Another thing about permitting reform: No one has ever discovered a way to make a joke involving the words permitting reform, and we’re not about to try.