The same polling outfits that missed the America First movement twice are back with numbers showing President Trump's approval at 38.7 percent — and two Republican Senate candidates in must-win races are ignoring every last spreadsheet to bet on the grassroots instead.
Why it matters: The consultant class reads polls and panics. Working-class voters read their paychecks and show up. If Husted and Paxton are right, the polling industry is about to get another black eye — and the people who actually knock doors and fill rally venues will have proven, again, that energy beats models.
In Ohio, Sen. Jon Husted is locked in a tight rematch with former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. RealClear Politics shows Brown with a slim lead. The same aggregates put Trump's approval underwater at 38.7 percent. Husted isn't flinching. He pointed out to reporters that Trump carried Ohio by eight points in 2016, eight again in 2020, and eleven in 2024 — a trajectory the pollsters still can't explain.
"And people have not all of a sudden decided that they want radical left-wing policies like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden," Husted said. "And so it's a race between me and Sherrod Brown. And I'm confident we'll be successful because we're just working hard. We're getting our message out there." He added: "And I bring common sense versus crazy."
The Mechanicsburg Patriot News framed Trump's polling as an "awful drag" and gave generous space to the president's bizarre rally comments about Husted's physique — as if that moves a single voter's grocery bill.
Down in Texas, the picture is tighter and the warning signs sharper. The latest University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll has Democratic state Rep. James Talarico leading Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton 50 to 47 percent, within the 3.3-point margin of error. A string of October polls — ReconMR, UMass Lowell, YouGov, the New York Times, Fox News — all show Talarico with a slight edge or tied.
The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal buried the most important number in the survey: independent likely voters break for Talarico 69 to 11 percent. That is a structural problem, not a rounding error. Paxton also suffers a base-enthusiasm gap — just 69 percent of Republicans view him favorably, with 15 percent unfavorable. Talarico, by contrast, gets 92 percent favorable from Democrats and virtually no intra-party defections.
Trump has campaigned hard for Paxton, with stops in Denton and San Antonio just this month. The president's time on the ground tells you what the polls won't: the movement still draws crowds, and the candidate needs them.
The polls say Trump is a liability. The rally schedules say he's an asset. The voters will sort it out. The only certainty is that whichever way these races break, the people who got 2016 and 2020 wrong will claim they saw it coming all along.
