Pollster Nate Silver says Democrats have a 94 percent chance to win back the House. He also gives them a 75 percent chance to retake the Senate next month. This prediction comes from his Silver Bulletin analysis, which the New York Post reported on Tuesday. Silver believes other forecasters are too cautious about these odds. He thinks the data shows a much stronger path for the opposition party.
Silver argues the scenario is “more robust than if you just treat all of the states in the middle of the table as pure toss-ups,” highlighting specific races where Democrats hold an edge. According to his analysis, candidates like Mary Peltola in Alaska and Sherrod Brown in Ohio have led in most polls. Silver noted that flipping four seats plus North Carolina would give Democrats a 51-49 majority in the upper chamber. This would mark only the second time in 70 years both chambers flip in one election.
Absolutely locking in that Mike Rogers needs to lose in 2 weeks, but man the pollsters that showed Haley behind over the summer were either made up or highly partisan. And a lot of smart people fell for the op.
— Neera Tanden🌻 (@neeratanden) October 21, 2026
While Silver looks forward, a recent scandal has shaken the trust in polling numbers. An outfit called Wedgewood Polls admitted on social media that most of its results were not real. The Washington Examiner reported that the organization called itself “an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry,” claiming their fake numbers were treated as legitimate by major aggregators and news outlets.
Wedgewood Polls declared, “Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms — including being cited on air and in reporting by outlets such as MS Now” The group said they added their fake data to The New York Times and VoteHub without any real history or credentials. They admitted to having “no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases,” demonstrating how easily false data can spread when oversight is weak.
The fallout from these fake polls hurt actual people running for office. Mallory McMorrow, a former Michigan Democratic Senate candidate, stated her campaign fell victim to bogus polling. She wrote that a fake poll in late June showed her “plummeting into single digits.” This number was at odds with her own internal data, but the media believed the fake report. McMorrow stated that her donations dried up and her “devastated” volunteers panicked because of the bad numbers.
As one of the candidates featured in these polls – the infamous one in late June that showed me plummeting into single digits (which was at odds with our internals) – here’s the impact of this “experiment”
– Donations dried up
– Volunteers were devastated and pleading for guidance on what to do
– Reporters hounded me with calls to drop outSure, a point was proven. Polling is broken. But tens of thousands of people poured their hearts, time, energy, hard-earned money into something they believed in – for a year-and-a-half, and it was treated like a game. Our volunteers gave their all. And then some. I felt like I had let so many of them down.
To be extremely clear, Michigan Democrats are locked in to beat Mike Rogers. We WILL send @AbdulElSayed to the US Senate.
But between crap like this, endless fundraising texts that drive supporters away with spammy fake deadlines and trash “match” claims, scam PACs run rampant for firms to grift without actually supporting candidates, undisclosed content creators pushing content out either misrepresenting themselves as residents of states they don’t live in or hiding whether they were paid and by who so they could make a buck, and the tidal wave of dark money ads — I hope Democrats are ready to blow up the system with campaign finance and transparency reforms.
Trust is already at an all-time low. We don’t get out of this mess without rebuilding trust.
And media – who loves to ride the drama of a pollercoaster – needs to take a hard look at what’s legitimate and what’s not.
If this teaches us anything – DON’T GET COMPLACENT AND DON’T TRUST THE POLLS.
LOCK IN. SIGN UP FOR A CANVASSING SHIFT. LEAVE NOTHING TO CHANCE OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS.
— Mallory McMorrow (@MalloryMcMorrow) October 21, 2026
The pressure became too much, and McMorrow dropped out of the race on July 5. She explained the impact of this “experiment” on her life and career. The Washington Examiner noted that the group claimed they conducted only one real poll in Nebraska, leaving the rest of their data as a test case for how the industry fails.
Wedgewood Polls declared that “The polling industry needs major reform” after revealing their deception. They argued that the system allows anyone to create fake data and have it accepted as fact. Former President Barack Obama has also warned about the danger of close margins. He acknowledged that contests with narrow leads might easily reverse, stating, “All these races that are showing we’ve got a 2- or 3-point lead or it’s a toss-up, we could end up losing all of them by 2 points,” and added that such small gaps are “within the margin of error.”
Despite the warning signs, Silver remains optimistic about the Democratic chances.
