What should conservatives make of the steady stream of polls showing that Democrats are winning the national “generic ballot” for Congress? Answer: Nothing, because the “generic ballot” is a meaningless metric intended to disillusion and demoralize conservative voters, not measure voter sentiment in an actual election for public office.
For example, a recent Harvard/Harris poll (9/26-9/28) oversampled Democrats to show Democrats winning the generic congressional ballot 51% to 49%.
And Nate Silver, the establishment media’s favorite polling guru (who rarely actually gets an election right, see Trump 2024 for an example) has Republicans getting clobbered in the meaningless generic congressional ballot.
As our online friend @DataRepublican, one of the smartest numbers analysts we know, noted in a recent post to her must-read feed on X, the polls are full of contradictory and in some cases improbable results.
Her take aligns with ours as she observed, “The strongest proof that polling is nothing more than institutional soft power warfare is that they’re putting out polls which give excellent chances of flipping governors in OR and MN while also saying Blue Texas will happen.”
She says she doesn’t trust any polls except Quantus Insights.
Here’s what Jason Corley, co-Founder, lead pollster, and election forecaster at Quantus Insights said about the state of the generic ballot polling being published by the establishment media:
Something bizarre is happening underneath the national polling, and I think it deserves a closer methodological look.
Trump’s net approval ranges from RMG’s -10 to CNN’s -34 for an extraordinary 24-point spread.
Yet, take a look at the generic ballot:
CNN: Trump –34 | D+8
Ipsos: –30 | D+8
Echelon: –28 | D+8
Fox: –22 | D+7
NYT/Siena: –21 | D+8
Quantus: –19 | D+8
Rasmussen: –13 | D+8
RMG: –10 | D+6
Across 14 recent polls, Trump net disapproval and the Democratic generic-ballot margin are positively correlated, as we should expect, but only modestly: r ≈ .32.
That deserves more attention. CNN (and Ipsos) can measure Trump 24 points worse than RMG and 10 to 15 points worse than the aggregate, while somehow arriving neatly right at the same congressional ballot average.
Remarkable, observed Mr. Corley.
Maybe there is a large and growing bloc of Trump-disapproving Republicans who are still voting the GOP ticket.
Maybe differences in mode, weighting, question construction or response behavior or something else, anything, that is producing these unusually large house effects in presidential approval.
But when one political measure varies by 24 points across pollsters while a closely related measure remains exactly the same, that should trigger some serious QC work.
“I simply can’t accept all of these outlier approval numbers at face value without understanding why the generic ballot isn’t moving with them,” concluded Mr. Corley.
Hint to Mr. Corley: The reason your results don’t seem to make any sense is because you are polling a meaningless question.
And while Mr. Corley ruminates about a potential “large and growing bloc of Trump-disapproving Republicans who are still voting the GOP ticket,” there is very likely an equally large, or perhaps larger, bloc of conservatives and MAGA voters who disapprove of Congress generically as an institution, or as currently constituted, but who plan to vote for conservative and MAGA Republican congressional candidates precisely because they angry about the failures of the current Congress to advance President Trump’s MAGA agenda.
As we keep saying, there’s no national “generic” congressional election – it is 435 individual elections for the House of Representatives and 100 individual Senate elections, of which 35 seats are up in 2026 - including special elections in Florida and Ohio.
You know you are entering the peak Democrat desperation phase of any political campaign year when the New York Times and other Leftwing media outlets start publishing polls showing Republicans getting trounced in the upcoming election, while the polls also show voters overwhelmingly reject Democrat policies.
A September 24–27, 2026 Quinnipiac poll of registered voters found only 22% approved of how Democrats in Congress are handling their job; 69% disapproved. Independents were 17% approve / 73% disapprove.
Responding to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted June 26–29, 2026 42% said the Democratic Party is too extreme; 30% said it is not; 31% were not sure.
A Strength in Numbers / Verasight, conducted in April 2026 found Democrats 45% favorable / 48% unfavorable. The same poll found 51% called them “out of touch with ordinary Americans” and 46% called Democrats “too extreme in its positions.”
What the Leftwing establishment media is doing with this demoralization campaign is simple and predictable: Telling voters not to believe their own eyes and ears and to ignore the deeply unpopular positions of the Democrats’ Far Left socialist and communist candidates.
The Democratic Party’s new Far Left Socialist and Communist agenda is deeply unpopular and deeply distrusted by a majority of voters. The only way they can win is to demoralize Republican and conservative voters into staying home and not voting – don’t let them win that way.
So, ignore the doomerslop and meaningless generic ballot and get engaged in winning your local congressional election. Here are four simple, things you can do to save America, and you don’t have to do all four; pick one if your time is limited and commit to carrying it through until the polls close on November 3, 2026. And, have a plan to vote, vote, and make sure fifteen conservative friends have a plan to vote and vote too.
George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie's ConservativeHQ.com and is a veteran of over 300 political campaigns, including every Republican presidential campaign from 1976 to 2012. A member of American MENSA, he also served as a precinct election official during numerous election cycles.
