America is furious.
Democrats are furious at Trump. Republicans are furious at Democrats. Independents are furious at just about everyone.
At last, something we can agree on.
INDEPENDENT VOTERS AREN’T PICKING A POLITICAL TEAM, THEY JUST FEEL PICKED ON
With just under a week until the midterms, Americans are being told that everything is at stake. Democracy. The economy. Our freedoms. The future of the country itself.
And yet, according to AP-NORC polling, only about two in 10 voters believe either political party is strongly focused on helping people like them or capable of solving important problems.
We’ve never been told an election matters more. We’ve rarely expected less from the people we’re electing.
So here’s the question I’ve been thinking about as a pollster.
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What happens when everyone is angry, but not everyone is angry enough to vote?
Because that’s what makes this election so difficult to predict.
We spend an enormous amount of time asking Americans whom they support. But in a midterm election, the more important question may be whether they care enough to show up.
And the latest polling suggests those are two very different things.
TRUMP VOTERS REVEAL THEIR BIGGEST FEAR HEADING INTO MIDTERMS — AND IT’S NOT RISING PRICES
A CNBC survey found that 74% of Democrats worry President Donald Trump will exceed his constitutional authority if Republicans retain control of Congress. Meanwhile, 54% of Republicans fear Democrats will enact democratic socialist policies.
Those aren’t equivalent concerns, or equally intense ones. But they tell us something important about the electorate.
Democrats fear a president with too much power. Republicans fear a government with too much reach.
Both sides have plenty to be angry about.
DEMOCRATS THINK A BLUE WAVE IS BUILDING. HERE ARE 3 FORCES THAT COULD STOP IT
But anger doesn’t vote. People do.
And here’s where things get interesting.
Research examining the 2018 midterms found that worry helped predict who actually voted. Enthusiasm did not show the same relationship.
Remember 2018? Nearly half of eligible Americans voted, the highest midterm turnout in more than a century.
Apparently, Americans don’t necessarily need to love their candidates to get themselves to the polls. Sometimes worrying about the alternative is motivation enough.
Which brings us to 2026.
Pew Research finds Democrats have a substantial motivation advantage. Among voters who say they’re extremely motivated, Democrats lead Republicans by 24 points.
If those were the only people voting, Democrats could start planning a very enjoyable election night.
But look at a different group.
Among people who actually voted in both 2022 and 2024, the Democratic advantage is just six points.
That’s an enormous difference.
The people who say they’re most motivated to vote aren’t necessarily the same people with the strongest history of showing up.
And that’s a distinction worth remembering before anyone starts declaring a landslide.
The latest Fox News poll gives Democrats a 54% to 45% advantage on the generic congressional ballot. But among voters certain to participate, that lead narrows to six points.
CBS News projects Democrats will win 229 House seats, enough to reclaim the majority.
But CBS has identified another complication.
Democrats have more voters who say they’re definitely voting or have already voted. Republicans have more voters who say they might vote.
In other words, Democrats have more of the voters who say they’re coming. Republicans have more of the voters who haven’t decided whether to bother.
And that may be the most important political question of the next week.
Will those Republicans show up? Will they stay home? Will something happen in the final days that convinces them this election matters?
Nobody knows for certain.
And in a closely divided House, the answer could determine who controls Congress.
This is why polling is both enormously useful and endlessly frustrating.
We can measure what Americans think with considerable precision.
Predicting what they’ll actually do is harder.
In fact, one of the most revealing findings from Pew’s analysis of the 2022 midterms is that Republican gains were driven largely by differences in turnout, not a great wave of voters changing their minds.
Among Americans who voted in both 2020 and 2022, very few switched parties.
What changed was who showed up.
Seventy-one percent of Trump’s 2020 voters participated in the 2022 midterms, compared with 67% of Biden’s 2020 voters.
Four points.
Not exactly the stuff of dramatic campaign commercials.
But across millions of voters, a few points can change the outcome of an election.
Sometimes elections aren’t decided because Americans change their minds. They’re decided because different Americans show up.
And suddenly, a few things about this campaign begin to make more sense.
Take Trump’s whistle-stop tour.
Why is a sitting president spending the final days of a midterm campaign racing from rally to rally when his approval ratings are so low?
Because Republicans may not need him to change many minds. They need him to get the right people out of the house.
Trump has demonstrated an unusual ability to attract voters who don’t always participate in elections. The challenge for Republicans is getting those voters to show up when Trump himself isn’t on the ballot.
A rally may not change someone’s opinion of the president. But it might change whether that person votes.
And in a close election, that’s worth considerably more than another favorable headline.
Then consider something that has received surprisingly little attention: voter registration.
Since 2018, the party-registration balance has shifted toward Republicans by roughly eight points in North Carolina, seven in Pennsylvania, five in Nevada and four in Arizona.
Those aren’t election results. Registering Republican doesn’t mean someone will vote Republican, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee they’ll vote at all.
But the shifts suggest the pool of potential voters has changed.
And that matters enormously when turnout is the great unknown.
Democrats may have an advantage among voters who say they’re highly motivated. Republicans may have a larger reservoir of potential voters than older assumptions about the electorate would suggest.
The question is whether those voters show up.
Registration tells us who’s on the roster. Polling tells us who’s ahead. Turnout tells us who actually plays.
That’s why a few points of registration movement, a presidential rally and the enthusiasm gap are all pieces of the same story.
And it’s why the outcome remains so difficult to predict.
Now consider the mood of the country.
The latest Fox News poll finds that 74% rate the economy negatively. Sixty-six percent are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Just 18% say their families are better off than two years ago.
Americans are unhappy. That’s clear.
But unhappiness doesn’t automatically tell us what they’ll do.
Some angry voters become activists. Some become reliable voters. Some decide the whole system is hopeless and stop paying attention.
The same emotion can produce very different behavior.
And there’s another complication.
Americans aren’t particularly convinced that voting will solve their problems.
An October AP-NORC survey found roughly eight in 10 registered voters want Congress to prioritize lowering the cost of living.
Yet CBS finds that most voters don’t expect their financial circumstances to improve regardless of which party wins.
Americans know exactly what they want fixed. They just don’t have much confidence that either party will fix it.
That creates two competing forces.
Fear of what happens if the other side wins may drive people to the polls.
But frustration with both parties may convince some voters that the outcome won’t make much difference.
Which force wins?
That’s the question.
And the parties are spending an extraordinary amount of money trying to influence the answer.
Since Sept. 1, Democrats have spent more than $163 million on advertisements mentioning Trump. Republicans have spent approximately $11 million doing the same.
Democrats are spending nearly 15 times as much talking about Trump as Republicans are.
Apparently, Democrats have decided their most effective campaign spokesman is Donald Trump. Republicans seem considerably less enthusiastic about putting him in their advertisements.
But all that advertising is ultimately aimed at the same objective.
Get people to care enough to vote.
Early voting is already running ahead of the comparable point in 2022. More than 13 million early and mail ballots had been cast nationally by Oct. 22, compared with roughly 9 million at a similar point four years ago.
That sounds like a sign of enormous enthusiasm.
Maybe it is.
Or maybe people who would have voted on Election Day are simply voting earlier.
Early voting tells us that ballots are being cast. It doesn’t necessarily tell us how many additional people will vote.
And it certainly doesn’t tell us which party will benefit.
The same is true of outrage.
A country can be furious and still produce a surprisingly close election.
A party can dominate among the most motivated voters and still struggle if the other side’s less enthusiastic supporters decide to participate.
And a candidate can win without persuading many people who weren’t already inclined to vote for that candidate.
That’s what makes this election so difficult to predict.
The most important voters may not be the ones changing their minds about Democrats or Republicans.
They may be the ones changing their minds about whether to bother voting at all.
Of course, the polls currently favor Democrats. The Fox News survey gives them a meaningful advantage. CBS projects they will reclaim the House.
Those are important findings, and they shouldn’t be dismissed.
But a poll is a picture of an electorate. An election is an event in which some of those people participate and others don’t.
The difference can be decisive.
So as we head into the final week, I’d pay less attention to the loudest voices and more attention to the people we aren’t hearing from.
The occasional voter. The dissatisfied independent. The Republican who dislikes the direction of the country but isn’t sure the Democrats would be better. The Democrat who fears Trump but isn’t convinced Congress can change much.
These are the people who could decide the election.
Not necessarily because they’ve changed their minds about politics.
But because they may change their minds about participating.
The swing voter who changes parties gets all the attention. But the voter who swings between voting and staying home may decide this election.
And that’s why Trump is on the road. Democrats are spending millions talking about him, and both parties are fighting over people who already agree with them.
The question isn’t just which party Americans prefer.
It’s which party can get its Americans to vote.
