“Mike Johnson: 'The polls are wrong'”, 27 October 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
Mike Johnson says the polls are wrong, and he says it loudly. Monday on Fox News, the Speaker told Laura Ingraham that surveys showing Democrats ahead are, in his word, "even" worse than they look for the pollsters, not for Republicans, with one week left before the midterms. That same day, Johnson's office also put out dozens of statements endorsing him for the leadership job he already holds — the kind of thing a man secure in his majority does for sport.
Confidence. Actually, call it caution: twelve days earlier, campaigning in New Bern, North Carolina, Johnson gave the real explanation for why House Republicans look rattled, and it wasn't the public surveys. The trouble, he said, is that his own members won't respond to "our own polling." A speaker certain the public polls are lying does not also need a private poll his caucus won't open.…
…(cont) The Senate side ran the identical play, earlier and in front of a bigger crowd. On Sept. 2, Majority Leader John Thune told KELOLAND News back home in South Dakota that he is "a realist," and that he worries about Republicans losing the Senate majority, citing high prices and the president's own falling approval. Eight days later, at Trump's midterm convention in Dallas, the party's own crowd booed Thune off the stage he was standing on.
Thune is not worried, he insists in public — he is, by his own account, and he said so eight days before his own convention proved it for him in front of a camera. This week, CBS News describes the job in softer terms: a "balancing act," a "quiet effort" to hold the majority, his biggest test yet — language built for a man who is winning, not one bracing to lose.
Put the Speaker's endorsements beside the Majority Leader's convention crowd and the week's arithmetic is simple. Both of them, on the record, in the same stretch of days, told someone else the opposite — one his own pollsters, the other a TV station back home. Neither correction got walked back. It just got buried under the next press release.
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“"The polls are wrong" is what a guy says right before he hands out business cards to everybody in the room. Johnson floods the wire with endorsements for a job nobody threatened, and Thune tells a South Dakota TV station he's scared eight days before his own crowd boos him off a stage in Dallas. When both of them are this busy telling you it's fine, that's usually the week it isn't.”
“Look, the Speaker isn't worried, he's thorough — forty endorsements is due diligence, not a tell. And Thune calling himself a "realist" about the majority is just good leadership, honest about headwinds, which is — okay, that's not exactly what "the majority is safe" usually sounds like. Never mind. The polls are wrong. Stick with that.”
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is professing confidence in his party’s position with just one week to go until the 2026 midterms, despite polling showing Republicans are in a tough spot. Johnson told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Monday that he believes polls showing big leads for Democrats are underestimating Republicans. “I think [polls…
Senate Majority Leader John Thune is fighting to maintain Republican control of the U.S. Senate. CBS News' Kaia Hubbard spoke with Thune about his leadership and behind-the-scenes work.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has tried to balance passing the president's agenda and preserving the independence of the Senate. The midterms are his biggest test yet.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
