Two polling companies were caught running completely fake surveys this election cycle.
Now one of MSNBC's own anchors is questioning whether the rest of them are any better.
What she found on the ground contradicts everything her network has been telling America.
The Paxton Talarico Race Is Running Into a 15 Year Texas Polling Problem
MSNBC anchor Katy Tur told Puck News co-founder Peter Hamby she had grown "a little more skeptical" of Texas polling after spending time in the state – where Republicans she met kept repeating the same phrase: "I'm going to vote for the team."
That is the answer you give when your candidate is weak but you are voting party loyalty anyway, and Tur said something else was working against the polls underneath it – Texas Republicans vote like it is muscle memory, and no candidate, no scandal, and no media saturation campaign changes that.
Tur asked Hamby directly: are pollsters getting honest answers from Texans, or just "the answers that people think they want to hear"?
Hamby called it herding – the practice of steering poll numbers toward what the media is already reporting rather than capturing what voters are actually going to do.
https://twitter.com/OpenSourceZone/status/2113406854118223962
Going back to 2010, national polling outfits consistently missed Republican strength in Texas by between 4 and 16 points – in 2014, polls showed Republicans ahead by 11 in the Texas Senate race, and Republicans won by 27.
In 2020, polls had Trump winning Texas by a single point, and he won by five and a half.
CNN data analyst Harry Enten confirmed the same pattern holds nationally – Republicans have outperformed their September polls by at least 5 points in multiple key states across 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2024.
The Texas Senate race between Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico is the template for this exact dynamic, and while polls showing Talarico ahead have Democrats salivating over their first statewide Texas win in more than 30 years, Paxton told Fox News that once voters see the real James Talarico – not the fake moderate running campaign ads – they will make the right call.
Fifteen years of Texas polling history is on his side.
Why the 2026 Midterm Polls Keep Missing Real Texas Voters
A USC Dornsife study after the 2020 election found the answer to what Tur was picking up on the ground.
When pollsters stopped asking "who will you vote for?" and started asking "who do you think your neighbor will vote for?" – results suddenly tracked the actual election outcome far more accurately.
An Echelon poll Hamby cited on air confirms exactly this: using the neighbor methodology, Republicans showed a three-point lead – the opposite of what headline polling is reporting.
Conservative voters have learned that admitting to a pollster they are voting Republican invites a lecture, so they give the answer the media wants and then vote how Texans actually vote.
An October Fox News survey captured the dynamic – Talarico leading by two points while the same Texas voters said they want Republicans to control the Senate, two different answers from the same group of people, which tells you precisely how much those poll numbers are worth.
These organizations are not measuring public opinion – they are manufacturing it, building the illusion of a Texas blue wave to suppress conservative turnout and extract checks from donors backing candidates who cannot win.
And now even the anchors pushing the narrative are starting to blink.
When an MSNBC host spends time with actual Texas voters and comes back saying the polling does not match what she found on the ground, that is not a rogue reporter having a crisis of conscience – that is fifteen years of wrong calls finally catching up to an industry that thought nobody was keeping score.
Texas conservatives have been hanging up on pollsters for years, and on November 3rd, every Democrat who wrote a check based on those polls is going to find out why – just too late to do anything about it.
Sources:
- Mike LaChance, "Katy Tur of MSNOW Says She is Having Doubts About Midterm Polling in Texas After Traveling There," The Gateway Pundit, October 22, 2026.
- Alex Griffing, "MS NOW's Katy Tur Says She's 'More Skeptical' of Texas Midterm Polling After Her Trip," Mediaite, October 22, 2026.
- Staff, "'Fool Me Once': CNN Analyst Has Bad News for Democrats Who Believe Recent Polling Numbers," The Blaze, October 2026.
- Staff, "Fake Moderate Talarico Texas Surge Tests Paxton Fight to Hold Crucial GOP Senate Seat," Fox News, 2026.
- Matt Margolis, "The Media, the Midterms, and the Fine Print," PJ Media, October 12, 2026.