The polls got it wrong before November 2024, and one man saw it coming.
Now that same analyst is reading the primary numbers from Wisconsin and Michigan — and what he sees should alarm every Republican in Washington, DC.
Because if the GOP doesn’t wake up fast, November 3 could be a catastrophe nobody saw coming.
A Track Record Built on Reading What Polls Miss
Craig Keshishian served on President Ronald Reagan’s polling team. He helped study Reagan’s 1980 landslide over President Jimmy Carter — a 489-to-49 electoral college demolition that the mainstream polls never predicted. The lesson from that race was simple: the surveys were missing whole categories of Americans. Working people. Small business owners. Rural and suburban voters who didn’t answer pollsters’ calls and didn’t show up in the models.
Keshishian used that institutional memory heading into the 2024 presidential race. He told Daily Mail readers that the swing-state polling was off, that a “hidden surge” of Trump supporters would show up, and that history was repeating itself. He was right. President Donald Trump swept all seven battleground states and won the electoral college 312-226 over Vice President Kamala Harris.
But Keshishian isn’t resting on that call. He’s been running his multidimensional forecasting model against the 2026 midterm landscape, and what he’s found has flipped his earlier read completely. The tide, he says, has turned the other way. And the numbers coming out of the August primaries are not subtle.
Wisconsin and Michigan Are Flashing Red — for Republicans
Start with Wisconsin. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley defeated democratic socialist state Assemblymember Francesca Hong in the Democrat gubernatorial primary — but that’s not the story. More than 790,000 people voted in the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin, putting turnout at about 22% of registered voters. On the Republican side, Congressman Tom Tiffany defeated his opponent with 96.2% of the vote in a race that barely qualified as a contest. The source article puts the Republican total at 490,819 — less than two-thirds of what Democrats turned out.
That gap alone should be giving the GOP heartburn. But Michigan made it worse.
Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary in a close race over Representative Haley Stevens, overcoming a nearly $65 million onslaught of outside money and an establishment that had rallied around Stevens. He’ll face Republican Mike Rogers, who ran unopposed for his party’s nomination. More than 1.5 million Democratic voters cast ballots in Michigan, a midterm record for the state. Republicans, with Rogers running without a primary challenger, produced nothing to compare it to.
Keshishian’s source article puts the Democratic total in Michigan at more than 1,530,000 votes. The Republican side: zero contested ballots, zero comparable energy measurement. And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer endorsed Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, despite El-Sayed spending much of his primary campaign arguing Schumer should no longer lead Senate Democrats. The Democrat machine swallowed its pride and closed ranks. That’s what a party smelling blood does.
El-Sayed is a committed socialist who has championed government-run healthcare, including Medicare for All — a scheme that would hand Washington bureaucrats control over every American’s medical decisions, ration care, and eliminate the patient choice that makes the American healthcare system worth defending. His nomination is not a sign of Democrat moderation. It is a sign of Democrat confidence.
History Says This Is How It Happens
Keshishian points to 1986. Reagan had just won 49 states in 1984. The economy was solid. And yet the GOP got wiped out in the Senate midterms, losing eight seats and handing control of the chamber to Democrats. The reason wasn’t the economy. It was foreign entanglements — the Beirut bombing, the pullback from Lebanon, the controversy over covert support for Nicaraguan rebels — that left voters feeling the administration had lost its focus on what mattered most at home.
The parallel to today is uncomfortable. Gas prices, grocery bills, and utility costs haven’t fallen meaningfully from their post-COVID highs. Interest rates remain a wall for first-time homebuyers and small business owners trying to get a loan. Many of the younger and minority voters who broke for Trump in 2024 — some for the first time — are looking at their wallets and wondering where the change they voted for actually landed.
And America’s involvement in the Iran conflict is generating real friction inside the Trump coalition. Keshishian’s analysis suggests this could cost Republicans at the margins, exactly where margins matter most.
The historical company is not flattering either. President George H W Bush sat at 89% approval in early 1991 after the Gulf War. Less than two years later, Bill Clinton beat him with a message built around kitchen-table economics. Winston Churchill, who helped save Western civilization from the Nazis, was voted out of office months after the war ended because British voters decided socialism’s economic promises sounded better than his party’s platform. Voters are not sentimental. They are practical. When they feel squeezed, they look for someone to blame — and the party in power is always the first candidate.
George W Bush is the only modern president who gained congressional seats in a midterm, picking them up in 2002 after September 11. That exception proves the rule: only an attack on the homeland itself produces a rally-around-the-flag effect strong enough to override economic discontent. Absent that, the pattern holds.
The Ground Game Gap Nobody Wants to Admit
Keshishian is blunt about the structural problem. Democrats have turned ballot harvesting and turnout operations into something approaching an industrial process. Conservative activist Scott Presler’s Early Vote Action organization is on the ground registering new Republican voters and building what he calls the most aggressive ballot-chasing and get-out-the-vote operation in its history — the same playbook that helped flip Pennsylvania for President Trump in 2024. And Turning Point Action, the political action arm of Turning Point USA founded by the late Charlie Kirk, describes itself as existing to “equip and empower all generations to engage in grassroots activism.” These efforts are real and they matter.
But Keshishian’s warning is that Republican voters are sleepwalking. Without Trump on the ballot, the emotional engine that drove record turnout in 2024 isn’t running at full power. The voters who would have crawled over broken glass to pull the lever for Trump in a presidential race are not necessarily the same voters who show up in November for a midterm featuring candidates who haven’t generated that kind of loyalty.
Add to that a wrinkle Keshishian raises alongside GOP pollsters Matt Towery and Robert Cahaly: the surveys may now be undercounting traditional Democrat voters — moderate and center-left Americans who are uneasy about the socialist direction of their party but are still ignoring pollsters’ calls. That dynamic, he argues, could explain why Hong led in Wisconsin’s polls but lost on election night. The polls caught the energy of the progressive base. They missed the quieter, larger mass of Democrats who showed up and voted for the centrist option.
That’s a different polling error than the one that missed Trump’s 2024 surge. And it’s one that makes the November picture even harder to read from the Republican side.
College campuses are empty during primary season. They won’t be empty in November. Every left-wing student organization in the country will be back on campus, registering voters and chasing ballots in the weeks before the election. That is a structural advantage that doesn’t show up in August turnout numbers but lands hard in the general.
What November Could Actually Look Like
Keshishian’s conclusion is stark. He believes there is a high likelihood the GOP loses both the House and the Senate in November, stalling the Trump agenda in its tracks and handing Democrats the institutional leverage to make the next two years miserable for the administration.
And if Democrats recapture Congress, don’t expect them to govern quietly. They said the same things before the 2018 midterms — no plans to impeach, just oversight, just accountability. Then they impeached Trump twice. The current round of “we just want to check the president’s power” rhetoric tracks the 2018 script almost word for word. Anyone who believes it this time wasn’t paying attention last time.
A Democrat-controlled Senate would mean the end of Trump’s ability to confirm judges, nominees, and cabinet officials without a fight. A Democrat House would mean two years of subpoenas, investigations, and manufactured spectacles designed to dominate the news cycle and run out the clock on the Trump agenda. The filibuster, which establishment Republicans cling to as a procedural security blanket, would be gone the moment Democrats had the votes — and with it would come court packing, amnesty schemes designed to permanently tilt the electoral map, and a push to add new states that would lock Republicans out of Senate majorities for a generation.
Keshishian isn’t predicting this because he wants it to happen. He’s predicting it because the numbers he’s looking at — primary turnout gaps, historical patterns, the absence of a galvanizing Republican candidate at the top of the ticket — all point in the same direction. The GOP has roughly ten weeks to prove him wrong. That means closing the ground game gap, giving voters a reason to show up beyond habit, and making the case that the economic promises of 2024 are being delivered.
The past is prologue. And right now, the past is not on the Republican side.
Sources: Daily Mail (Craig Keshishian column); PBS Wisconsin, “Democratic primary turnout soars in Wisconsin, other states in 2026”; NBC News, “Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary”; Daily Wire, “Schumer Endorses El-Sayed”; Northern News Now, “Tom Tiffany wins Republican nomination”; Daily Caller, “Matt Towery Shares What Can Push Republicans Hardest to Turn Out for Midterms”; Big League Politics/Scott Presler Substack; Daily Signal, “Turning Point Action Flexes Midterm Muscle in Indiana”
