The New York Times keeps publishing midterm polls that show President Trump’s party getting buried.
Democrats are already measuring the drapes. Republicans say the numbers are cooked.
And one pollster just pointed to one group of voters the media polls never saw coming.
Two Veteran Pollsters Pulled Apart the Times Numbers
Robert Cahaly, chief pollster at the Trafalgar Group, and Jim McLaughlin, partner and president of McLaughlin & Associates, joined Larry Kudlow on Fox Business in late October 2026 to pick through the surveys feeding the blue-wave storyline.
Kudlow started with a New York Times/Siena poll that had Republicans trailing by 11 points. He wanted to know how a national survey ends up with only 22 percent Republicans in the sample.
McLaughlin tossed in a second number that’s even harder to swallow. Only about 37 percent of the people in that poll were Trump voters, he said, in a country where Trump won roughly half the vote and swept every battleground state.
“I used to think that this stuff was just incompetence on the part of these media polls, but I think just like their media coverage is biased against Republicans and conservative candidates, I think their polls are,” McLaughlin said. “They’re undersampling Republicans, they’re undersampling conservatives, and they get these crazy numbers.”
Kudlow held up a very different survey from TIPP, the outfit run by pollster Raghavan Mayur, which showed Republicans down just four points. McLaughlin’s own national numbers landed in that same neighborhood, with Trump’s job approval hovering near 50 percent overall and sitting at 90 percent among Republicans.
Cahaly skipped the arithmetic and went after the purpose. He framed it as a simple question: “is a poll designed to reflect the electorate, or is it now more focused on affecting the electorate?”
“There’s no excuse for some of this,” he added.
Robert Cahaly Says the Telephone Gives the Game Away
Cahaly pins a big chunk of the problem on method. “These guys insist on these 20- and 30-question polls. They’re losing average people. They’re never going to answer those,” he said.
He also took a swing at live-caller polling, where a stranger dials your number and reads off questions. Cahaly asked Kudlow how many people under 50 he knew who would answer a call from an unknown number and start talking.
“It’s pseudoscience. It doesn’t make any sense,” Cahaly said.
Anybody who lets a strange area code roll to voicemail knows exactly what he means. The folks who do pick up, and then sit patiently through half an hour of questions from somebody they’ve never met, aren’t exactly a random slice of the country. Most people can’t get through a robocall about their car’s extended warranty without hanging up.
But the most interesting part of the interview came later. And almost nobody in the Beltway press will bother repeating it.
The Silver Wave Has a Long Memory
Cahaly credited Matt Towery of InsiderAdvantage with the name for what both men say they’re seeing: the “silver wave.”
According to Cahaly, “we’re seeing seniors way more engaged in this race, people, baby boomers, older, and even the older Xers.”
He gave reasons. Every one of them runs through memory.
The first is socialism. “They know what the two Germanys were like. They know what they looked like when the wall fell,” Cahaly said.
East Germans poured through the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. A 25-year-old watching that on the evening news turns 62 in 2026. That voter spent his whole youth hearing about the country that had to build a wall to keep its own people from running away.
Cahaly reached back even further. “They remember a Cuba that was a paradise in the Caribbean, and they saw what socialism did there.”
Fidel Castro seized power in Havana on January 1, 1959. Americans who remember the island before the revolution, and the rafts full of refugees who fled it afterward, don’t need a DSA organizer half their age explaining why government control of the economy will work out better next time.
And Democrats keep handing these voters fresh reminders. McLaughlin said the uptick among older voters showed up “since the Democrats have been nominating these socialists across the country.”
The Hostage Crisis Younger Voters Never Lived Through
Cahaly’s second reason caught Kudlow’s attention. He said older voters are “much more likely to support Trump’s policy in Iran,” and he explained why.
“They remember the Iranian crisis and hostages, but they remember all the ayatollahs and the ‘death to America’ and all the troops they were killing,” Cahaly said.
Iranian radicals stormed the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and held 52 Americans for 444 days. Jimmy Carter’s rescue attempt ended in a burning wreck in the Iranian desert in April 1980, and eight American servicemen died.
Voters who lived through that stretch know exactly what the regime in Tehran is. They also watched Washington’s foreign-policy crowd promise quick, tidy wars in that part of the world more than once, and they remember how those promises turned out. A President who refuses to bow to the mullahs while keeping American troops out of another Middle East quagmire lines up neatly with lessons that generation learned the hard way.
Cahaly’s third reason was the least romantic. “Last, they are least likely to be affected by gas prices,” he said. Retirees aren’t fighting rush hour twice a day, so the pump doesn’t bite them the way it bites a 35-year-old commuting 40 miles each way.
Kudlow, for his part, didn’t pretend to be a neutral observer. “Those are my folks. Those are my peers. I’ll fess up,” he said.
The Club Wants Its Party Back
Kudlow steered the conversation to Texas, where he noted that John Cornyn hasn’t been helping Ken Paxton and that one of George W Bush’s brothers announced he would vote for Democrat James Talarico.
Paxton knocked off Cornyn in the Republican primary. Cornyn co-sponsored a 2018 plan offering amnesty to Dreamers and championed the gun control bill Joe Biden signed in 2022.
“There’s no doubt, Larry, there is a club, and Trump has kind of broken up their little club, and they want it back,” Cahaly said. He went further: “the fact is they want the Trump era to be over, and they’re going to do whatever it takes to try to sink it.”
Compare that to Michigan. When Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens, the establishment favorite, in the Democrat Senate primary, Chuck Schumer lined up behind the left-wing winner instead of pouting. Democrat leaders close ranks around their insurgents. A certain kind of Republican insider sulks and leaks to reporters.
But Cahaly doesn’t think the sulking travels very far outside Washington, DC. His real question is whether the Beltway grumbling “filter[s] down” to regular folks in Texas and elsewhere. He said he doesn’t think it does.
Older Americans Vote, and Everybody Knows It
Census Bureau survey data from the 2022 midterms showed that 66.8 percent of American citizens age 65 and older cast a ballot. No other age group comes close to that kind of reliability in an off-year election.
So the math gets simple in a hurry. If a poll short-changes Republicans in its sample, and the most dependable voters in America happen to be the most fired up, the gap between the headline number and the actual count could get uncomfortable for a few newsrooms.
Of course, a pollster talking up his own numbers on television is still a pollster talking up his own numbers. Trafalgar and McLaughlin both work the Republican side of the street, and the folks at the Times would insist their methods hold up just fine. Fair enough. Election night grades everybody’s homework.
McLaughlin’s point about turnout cuts the other way, though. He said Trump can motivate the roughly 23 million Americans who voted for him but skipped the Republican line in the last congressional election, which explains why so many candidates want him on the trail.
“Our folks, and just like what Robert was just talking about, we’re seeing it, especially with older voters now. They’re coming out to the polls in droves,” McLaughlin said.
On January 20, 1981, Iran released 52 American hostages minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office. The kids who watched that moment on the evening news now make up the silver wave Robert Cahaly says the media polls keep missing.
Sources:
RealClearPolitics, “Robert Cahaly: ‘Silver Wave’ Of Boomers, Older Gen-Xers Who Remember Berlin Wall, Iranian Hostage Crisis Are Way More Engaged In Election”
Mediaite, “Shock NY Times Poll Shows GOP Getting Absolutely Smoked on Generic Congressional Ballot”
Political Wire, “Democrats Hold Big Lead on Generic Ballot”
America’s Health Rankings, “Voter Participation (Midterm) – Age 65+,” U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey, 2022