U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a press briefing at the White House, on the one-year mark into his second term in office, in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 20, 2026.
The 2026 midterm election polls have consistently delivered ominous news for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. From Trump’s war against Iran bogging down his fellow Republicans to previously solid Republican districts suddenly being put in play, there are many red flags facing the party as they approach the November electoral verdict.
Now a polling expert has more bad news: Democratic enthusiasm is so “bonkers” that the GOP should be “running scared.”
“Tonight, after a bruising Democratic primary, brand new polling shows that Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, is trailing his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in the first look at the general election matchup,” CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins said on Thursday night. Yet even though El-Sayed is very weak for a Democrat running in a year when Republicans are perceived as the national incumbent party, CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten pointed out that there is a twist which benefits Democrats.
“One thing that has stood out to me, as we've been watching these numbers and who's winning these primaries, is just the turnout period from Democrats,” Enten told Collins. “It's been absolutely bonkers. Huge. So I went ahead and I tried to tally up all of the turnout so far in the primaries. If you thought the Michigan senate poll was bad for Democrats, the turnout numbers in the primaries are very good news for Democrats. What are we talking about this year across all the primaries? It's 25-plus million. 25-plus million so far. You go back to 2018, which was a bonkers year for Democrats for the entire primary season. It was just 23 million.”
He concluded, “So Democrats are already running ahead of where they were in 2018, which was a year in which they did extremely well in the House races. Not nearly as well in the Senate races, but that map was tilted against them in a way that this year's, simply put, is not.”
Earlier in the same interview, however, Enten acknowledged that El-Sayed’s candidacy has distinct weaknesses.
“Abdul El-Sayed is a weak candidate by the metrics we normally go by,” Enten told Collins. “Just take a look at the net favorability rating of him in that poll. That is the favorable-minus-unfavorable. Look at this. He's 13 points underwater. That is, his unfavorable rating is 13 points higher than his favorable rating. And that is extremely unusual for the Democratic Senate candidates. The nominees who are running this year, you see the northern battleground ones that I have up in the graphic there. They're all on the plus side of the ledger. And so El-Sayed is significantly weaker than these other Democrats are running.”
He added, “And I will also note I went back and I tried to find every single poll I could find at this point in previous Michigan Senate campaigns in the 21st century, I believe that El-Sayed being down by that four point margin is the weakest that any Democrat has pulled at this point in a Senate race this entire century. So we'll see what happens over the next three months.”
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