Well, well, well. Wouldn’t you know it?
After months of listening to political experts and the media tell Americans that Republicans were headed for an absolute bloodbath in the midterms, the New York Times has suddenly discovered something rather interesting.
Late-deciding voters are breaking toward Republicans by NINE POINTS in seven critical Senate races.
And this little revelation comes just as Americans are heading to the polls.
How convenient, right?
For much of this election cycle, the message coming from the polling world has been downright miserable for Republicans. Dems were supposedly surging, the GOP was in serious trouble, and one gloomy forecast after another painted a picture of a political disaster waiting to unfold.
But we’ve been watching this polling circus for a long time at Revolver, and we’ve become increasingly suspicious of the way these numbers are packaged and sold to the American public.
Because somewhere along the way, political polling started looking like a very powerful way to influence it.
Think about the impact of repeatedly telling people their guy is doomed. What does that do to enthusiasm, donations, and the overall mood surrounding an election?
It kills it.
And when those numbers come from prestigious polling institutions, they’re treated like the political Ten Commandments and blasted everywhere.
But as we get closer to the actual voting day, things sometimes start quietly changing.
Which brings us to this story.
The New York Times has released its final round of polling, and buried inside all those rather depressing numbers for Republicans is a development that’s getting a lot of attention.
Apparently, the people who’ve been making up their minds most recently are leaning Republican.
JUST IN: Late deciders are swinging Republican by +9 points – NYT
— Ames (@VivaLaAmes11) November 2, 2026
The Times partnered with Siena University to survey voters in seven highly competitive Senate races, including Michigan, Texas, Alaska, and Ohio.
These are some of the contests that could determine which party controls the Senate after Tuesday.
And while the overall results still paint a favorable picture for Dems, the researchers discovered something interesting when they examined voters who had just made up their minds in the past month.
That group was breaking toward Republican candidates.
In a big way.
Newsmax:
Republicans are winning over late-deciding voters by 9 percentage points in seven battleground Senate races, according to a new poll suggesting the GOP is gaining momentum ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.
The New York Times/Siena University survey, released Sunday, found that voters who made their choices within the past month favored Republican candidates, even as Democrats maintained leads in six of the seven contests.
“There are still some undecided voters, and voters who decided only in the last month favored Republicans by a nine-point margin,” the Times reported.
After all the dire predictions, there’s apparently a sizable group of voters making their decisions later in the game who aren’t following the gloomy Republican script we’ve been hearing about.
And that brings us to one of our biggest complaints about political polling.
In many cases, they’ve been weaponized. But this isn’t something new, is it? Who can forget this doozy from the New York Times back in 2016:
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And that’s really the problem with the polling culture we’ve created.
People are being told to treat these polls as gospel. As if they’re telling us what’s going to happen, not what a very particular group of respondents told a very particular group of researchers at a very particular moment.
And once the media starts building a political narrative around the numbers, the narrative quickly becomes bigger than the poll.
And we all remember the 2016 presidential election, when virtually every important person in the political and media world was convinced Hillary Clinton was about to become America’s first female president.
The over-confidence was actually weird and scary.
And the New York Times was right there, publishing its presidential forecast with an eye-popping probability of victory for Clinton.
Why even bother to vote, guys. Hillary had this one in the bag, according to every poll on planet earth.
Three weeks later, Donald Trump was elected president.
Even so, Americans spent that election season being told the outcome was a foregone conclusion delivered from Mount Sinai.
And after most of the polls were proven wrong, we were told that it was some kind of fluke error that had to do with cell phones and landlines, and it’d be fixed.
Tech Psych:
First of all, the polling agencies do not and probably cannot sample a representative sample. They typically poll those who have landline, as opposed to cellular, telephone service. This skews to older people, as many if not most young adults do not have landlines. However, if they poll only those who have cell phones, this will skew to younger people, and older voters will be lost. The same is true with Survey Monkey polls, as this will skew to younger voters because younger people are more comfortable with computers than older people. This method also skews to more urban and suburban people and away from rural people.
Second, not only are any of these methods questionable, there is also the problem of who answers the poll. For example, I have a landline, but I never answer it unless it is from someone I know. If it is a pollster, I will not answer it. So what kind of people answer a pollster? We don’t know, and we don’t know how representative these people are. Secondarily, pollsters call multiple people at once, and when one person answers the phone, all of the other calls are dropped, so again, what kind of people are answering the poll, and how representative are they?
But was polling ever really broken, or is this exactly what it’s always been? A political weapon, largely wielded by the left, to undermine Republican candidates, dry up their fundraising, and convince voters there’s no point in showing up because the election is already lost?
Something to think about.
We’ll see how things shake out on Tuesday, and something tells us we’ll have plenty to talk about afterward, from the polls and vote counting to surprise upsets and voter turnout.
In the meantime, whatever else you’ve got going on today, make sure you get out there and cast your vote.
Revolver News
