Amy Walter: If Republicans Hold The Senate And House, It Will Be Because The Fighting Was On Their Turf
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/10/05/amy_walter_if_republicans_hold_the_senate_and_house_it_will_be_because_the_fighting_was_on_their_turf.html

Amy Walter, of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, argued on "PBS NewsHour" that polls may underestimate Republican support because disaffected Republican voters are harder to reach.

GEOFF BENNETT, PBS NEWSHOUR: Amy, as we inch closer toward the midterms, the polls underestimated President Trump in three presidential elections.

They were more accurate in the midterms. As we head into the midterms and poll after poll shows Democrats with a better-than-average shot of taking potentially both houses, how do we know those polls are accurate?

AMY WALTER, COOK POLITICAL REPORT: Right.

Well, the short answer is, you should take every single poll and understand that they do have a margin of error. So the accuracy is just within a certain band. But I do think that, for Republicans, their one hope here is that it's not that the polls are rigged or that there's something wrong with the polls, but that it is simply difficult to capture the kinds of voters right now that Republicans really need to turn out in order to be able to hold their own in this midterm election.

And that is disappointed, disaffected Republican voters. Those people are less likely to answer questions from pollsters. They're probably difficult to reach. But what Republicans have to hope is that, even though they're not getting picked up in the polls, because, quite frankly, they're not feeling great about things right now, they do ultimately show up to vote.

The other thing that we know is that the campaigns themselves, the Republican campaigns, they're spending millions of dollars on TV ads, but they're also spending millions of dollars to target and turn out those same voters.

So, if we wake up on Election Day and -- the day after the election, I'm sorry, and we find out that Republicans, they ended up holding the Senate and not losing as many seats as predicted in the House, it will be because, remember, as I said earlier, all of the fighting is happening on Republican turf.

And so those Republicans, even though they aren't feeling great about the economy, they're not feeling great necessarily about the way that the president's handling his job, they do feel -- they did feel an obligation to show up and vote, mostly because they didn't want Democrats to get in charge, not because they were sending a vote of approval necessarily to Republicans.