Mike Johnson: ‘The polls are wrong’

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is professing confidence in his party’s position with just one week to go until the 2026 midterms, despite polling showing Republicans are in a tough spot.

Johnson told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Monday that he believes polls showing big leads for Democrats are underestimating Republicans.

“I think it’s [polls are] even further off this time because more and more Republicans are unwilling to participate in these surveys,” Johnson said. “They don’t want to give their information to someone on the phone. … They’re calling it the partisan nonresponse bias.”

Partisan nonresponse bias has plagued the polling industry in past elections, most egregiously in 2020 and 2016, when polls underestimated President Trump in key battleground states. But those were presidential elections, with high turnout and Trump on the ballot. In midterm elections, polls have been significantly more accurate .

An analysis from political data analyst Nate Silver sought to measure the average polling miss and took an average of all polls conducted in the final three weeks of a campaign for House, Senate and governor compared with the end result. He found that in the two most recent midterms, 2018 and 2022, polls did not underestimate Republicans. In 2018, the average polling error was 0 points, and in 2022, polls underestimated Democrats by 0.3 points.

Despite political headwinds, namely high gas prices and Trump’s record-low approval ratings, Johnson has remained bullish on the GOP’s chances.

Earlier this month, he told CBS News that he intends to remain Speaker of the House because he did not think Republicans would lose, calling that an “unlikely scenario.”

“I don’t think it’s going to happen, so I don’t spend any time thinking about it,” Johnson said of his party losing control of the House.

But most political observers already consider the House something of a lost cause for the GOP. Nonpartisan election forecaster Decision Desk HQ, a partner of The Hill, gives Democrats an 80 percent chance of flipping the chamber, something they only need to pick up three seats to accomplish.

Tracking where the GOP is spending its money in the House tells a different story compared with Johnson’s optimism. In recent weeks, Republicans have pulled out of key races they need to defend to keep their majority, including New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District and Iowa’s 1st Congressional District — both of which Trump carried in 2024.