“We work for the New York Times. We're supposed to be an authoritative source of information, the truth. Polling can't really live up to that. So we always have to hedge. We don't know whether it's going to be right until the results come in. We've certainly been wrong before.”
GD POLITICS · Policy · November 2026
Context
Asked which way he feared the polls might miss before the midterms, Nate Cohn says he saw evidence pointing both ways. He explains why a newsroom pollster always has to hedge.
Transcript
…these races. Mississippi, we didn't pull, but other than that, we were prepared for Democrats to win all these, all of these little stats, like whether it was the biggest election for Democrats since Watergate and so on had ready before the election because we knew that kind of outcome was in play.
…worried about, but that you thought they might be underestimating Democrats. This was speculation on my part. You know, I read your analysis, but like, did I get that correct? Were you more concerned that your polls down the stretch were missing Democrats than that they were missing Republicans?
I'm concerned about all of it. Look, this is the sixth election we've done Time CNN polls for. I've needed to count them 16, 18, 20, 22, 24. So this was the sixth. And in those elections, I've just really never, in hindsight, I've never really known whether they were going to be right or wrong. You can look at the Data and see evidence either way before the election. In this election, I thought we had pretty clear evidence both ways that we wrote about different points. The non-response element was obvious. Democrats were much likelier to respond to our polls than Republicans, which we've seen before. Sometimes that augered for a polling misfire, like it did in 2020. Other times it didn't, like in 2022. We could also see before the election that the Democratic turnout was just going to be better than our polls supposed. We saw it in Florida. We saw it in terms of the black share of the electorate in a state like South Carolina. We also saw it in our Texas poll where we had Democrats up by 12 points among registered voters, seven points among likely voters.…
But like when you went to bed on election night eve, what was your biggest worry?
Well, I think that it's worth, to be honest, there are two separate worries. You know, one is like, what's the likeliest way the polls can err? And then the second one is what are the consequences if the polls err? You know, if the Republicans had won the Senate, and I didn't think that was going…
Yeah, I think that certainly makes sense. Overall, your polls showed Democrats winning the battleground states in the Senate by an average of five points. And that's what happened in the end. But it didn't happen in exactly the way your polls suggested. Ultimately, the Times Santa polls…
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