Democrats have been here before. The polls look good — no, incredible; if the numbers are to be believed, red states and districts are now in the party’s sights. But many Democrats are scarred by President Donald Trump beating his polls in 2016, 2020 and 2024. I have heard from friends and family who, after 10 years of MAGA dominance, are scared to get their hopes up, lest they be dashed. The same worries may be held by people you know, or perhaps yourself.

There’s an easy way to reduce that stress: Don’t follow the polls. Follow the money.

More specifically, follow where the money is being spent. Most people who track the latest polls and other data do so to stay informed. But political operatives are using a much larger amount of data, including private polling, to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in spending on ads and other expenditures.

Without a crystal ball, we cannot know whether to believe the polls this year. But the Republicans who are paid to know this stuff are behaving as if they believe the polls.

Sometimes, campaigns or groups see things that may not be visible in the public data. In 2016, for instance, Trump went on a blue-state swing in the campaign’s final days because, as his pollster Tony Fabrizio put it, “through the end, we saw [the polls] closing” even more than the public polling showed.

There’s no such aggression coming from the GOP this year. First came the Senate cuts, with GOP groups pulling out of the races in North Carolina and Georgia. And rather than shift the money to target Democratic-held seats, Republicans have moved that money to states where Democrats haven’t won a Senate race in 18 years (Iowa), 38 years (Texas) and 94 years (Kansas).

Then came the House cuts. Last week the House Majority PAC and the Congressional Leadership Fund pulled advertising in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where Rep. Don Bacon is retiring. This week, they retreated from two more districts, this time with GOP incumbents: New Jersey’s 7th District and Iowa’s 1st District. In the 2024 elections, voters gave Republicans a three-seat majority. With two weeks to go, the House GOP has already given up on that many seats. At the same time, Republican groups also pulled back from efforts to oust a half-dozen Democratic representatives in swing districts, including Reps. Kristen McDonald Rivet, Greg Landsmann, Tom Suozzi, and Henry Cuellar.

And as with the Senate, House GOP groups are almost entirely on the back foot elsewhere.

There are plenty of other reasons for Democrats to reject a doomer view of the midterm polls.

“Major Republican outside groups are airing ads in about 40 districts this week,” Punchbowl News reported Thursday. “They’re on defense in all but 11 of those districts. Seven of the 11 were redrawn by Republicans to strongly favor the GOP. Trump won 18 of these districts by 10 points or more.” As MS NOW’s Kevin Frey reported last month, Republicans are spending millions “in a dozen districts that the GOP redrew to favor Trump by at least nine percentage points.”

Without a crystal ball, we cannot know whether to believe the polls this year. But the Republicans who are paid to know this stuff are behaving as if they believe the polls.

Recent history suggests that cutting nearly a dozen candidates loose within weeks of an election doesn’t just augur poorly for those candidates, but for their fellow Republicans as well. At roughly this point in 2022, Republicans had pulled money out of Senate races in Arizona and New Hampshire but only one House race; Democrats lost the latter chamber but expanded their margin in the Senate. 2018 saw the reverse: The GOP cut back in a handful of House races but stayed in all the Senate contests until the final week of the campaign, and on Election Day, Democrats flipped the House but lost ground in the Senate.

There are plenty of other reasons for Democrats to reject a doomer view of the midterm polls. While polls underestimated Republicans by a handful of points in each of Trump’s presidential campaigns, they were not biased toward either party in the intervening midterms (and they slightly overestimated Republicans in special elections). As polling analyst G. Elliott Morris wrote over the summer, past polling bias does not predict future performance. Other metrics like the president’s approval rating, primary turnout and the share of Americans who identify as Democrats all correlate with a good night for Trump’s foes.

For many Democratic partisans, however, no data can calm the fears of midterm disappointment. But endlessly fretting about that possibility is no way for any of us to spend the Halloween season. So, the next time you’re worried about the polls, just remember: Republicans are, too.

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