Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Democrats lead in the polls, but their margins are tight, and a small polling error would be enough for Republicans to win. It’s like déjà vu all over again.
This is the situation election watchers find themselves in, yet again, in the final days of the 2026 midterm cycle. According to our averages of polls here at FiftyPlusOne, Democrats currently lead in seven Senate seats — North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Maine, Kansas, and Iowa — held by the Republican Party. That would be enough to bring them up to 54 seats, if the polls are exactly correct. In two additional seats — Nebraska and South Carolina — GOP candidates have leads within two points.
But that “if” is a really big if. For one thing, the Democratic margin in the polls in most of these states is so small (<3 points in 4, Alaska, Maine, Kansas, and Iowa; and <4 points in Ohio and Texas) that even the usual margin of sampling error could mean the result falls the other way. And then there’s the factor everyone’s worried about: a uniform underestimation of Republican candidates. That’s what happened in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Polls were more accurate — in fact, they were on average biased toward Republicans — in Senate races held for the 2018 and 2022 midterms.
To help you prepare for the potential consequences of polling error, FiftyPlusOne has added a new live-updating data tool to our Senate poll averages tracker that shows where each race would stand if this year’s polls miss in the same way that that state’s polls have missed in prior elections. You can look at two scenarios: In the first, polls miss as they did in the 2018 and 2022 midterms. In the second, they miss as they did in 2016, 2020, and 2024, the three cycles when Republicans were underestimated.