U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson shakes hands with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis
Speaker Mike Johnson spoke to Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night, where he was forced to face some very bad numbers.
He said the GOP's numbers were so bad because Ingraham was citing inaccurate information.
Ingraham cited the new Reuters/Ipsos poll, ahead of the midterms next Tuesday. It showed that, on the generic congressional ballot, registered voters preferred Democrats 47 percent to Republicans 36 percent.
“Now, people like Nate Silver say the polls would have to be really wrong, crazy wrong almost, for Republicans to pull out victories in the House, at least,” Ingraham said, speaking of the statistician and founder of FiveThirtyEight.
Silver told the New York Times on Monday, “Most analysts seem to have little to no confidence in the polling, but maybe they should,” he said.
“Polls in the past two midterms were pretty accurate and unbiased. More important, they may not be projecting anything all that remarkable," Silver added.
Ingraham cited a nonpartisan news poll, but Johnson tried to discount that as well.
“And then you have that new Reuters Ipsos poll showing registered voters favoring Democrats over Republicans 47 to 36. That’s on the generic congressional ballot. So, do you think that poll is not accurate?” she asked.
“Yes, the polls are wrong,” Johnson said. “Let me tell you why. Look, in the last 10 days, we had two polling organizations nationwide that have been exposed for completely fraudulent numbers, Wedgewood and SoCal Strategies. Then you have the more traditional polling organizations having to acknowledge quietly that their numbers are off."
Indeed, Wedgewood and SoCal Strategies were shown to be completely fraudulent. But Reuters, a news wire service, doesn't aggregate polls to get its numbers. They do their own surveys.
“CNN ran a story about a week ago. And they said that 14 out of the last 16 elections, the October generic ballot underestimated Republicans by an average of 4 points," Johnson claimed. “Laura, I think it’s even further off this time because more and more Republicans are unwilling to participate in these surveys."
According to Johnson, people being polled don't want to reveal their private information to someone over the phone.
“They don’t play along. They’re calling it the partisan nonresponse bias. That’s the technical term for ‘Republicans don’t trust you anymore,’” he claimed.
The one number that could confirm or deny Johnson's assessment is the early voting numbers. People who have already voted far surpass the number of voters in 2022, the last midterm election.
Ingraham: Nate Silver says the polls would have to be really wrong for Republicans to hold the house. Johnson: The polls are wrong. Let me tell you why. In the last 10 days we had two polling organizations nationwide that have been exposed for completely fraudulent numbers, Wedgewood and SoCal strategies…
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 27, 2026
