Democrats are taking big chunks of GOP voters in key Senate races, polls show
President Donald Trump has never had worse poll numbers with his base than he does ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
And a growing volume of polls shows a significant portion of that base is preparing to cross over and vote for Democrats.
New York Times-Siena College polls released over the weekend showed between 9% and 16% of Republican likely voters said they favored the Democratic nominee in five key states: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and Texas.
And these aren’t the only polls to show a sizable crossover effect — especially in the middle of the country.
All told, Democratic candidates have led among GOP voters by double digits in four key Senate races, and they lead by an average of at least 9 points in seven of the top 10 races, according to a CNN review of polling in each state.
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Democratic candidates also seem poised to take an especially large percentage of Republican voters who don’t identify with Trump’s MAGA movement — often around one-quarter of them. This data comes with an important caveat: Polling in the last few presidential elections has underestimated GOP support. And there are some signs that those misses may have been driven by polls reaching the right number of Republicans overall, but not enough of the party’s — and by extension, Trump’s — strongest supporters.
If that pattern holds this year, it’s possible that GOP-aligned voters may wind up more supportive of Republican candidates than the polls suggest now. But it is worth noting that polling in the last midterm election, in 2022, did not exhibit this pattern.
Perhaps the most striking numbers in the new Times-Siena polls came in Kansas, which has recently emerged as a surprising battleground. The poll showed Democrat Adam Hamilton tied with GOP Sen. Roger Marshall at 45% among likely voters, with the Libertarian candidate at 5%.
So how has Hamilton made the race that close in red Kansas, a state that Trump carried by 16 points in 2024? The pastor has peeled off 16% of registered Republicans and 10% of self-identified Republicans. (By contrast, Marshall took just 2-3% of each category of Democrats, according to the survey.)
But Hamilton is not the only Democratic candidate pulling double digits among Republican voters. The Times-Siena poll showed Iowa Democratic nominee Josh Turek taking 12% of registered Republicans and 5% of self-identified Republicans. And the state representative also took double digits among self-identified Republicans in recent polls from Marist College (13%) and Fox News (10%).
In Alaska, Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola took 13% of registered Republicans and 9% of self-identified Republicans in the Times-Siena poll.
And in Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff was taking 10% of self-identified Republicans in the most recent high-quality poll, from Fox News in late June.
Other Democrats take slightly less but still significant numbers.
The Democratic nominees in North Carolina (Roy Cooper), Ohio (Sherrod Brown) and Texas (James Talarico) have all averaged 9% of the GOP vote in recent high-quality polls, according to a CNN review.
Roy Cooper speaks to reporters after casting his ballot on the first day of in-person early voting in the state’s primary election in Raleigh in February.Allen G. Breed/AP
Among other Democrats: New Hampshire Rep. Chris Pappas was averaging 5%, former Maine state Senate President Troy Jackson was averaging 4%, and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed was averaging 3%.
Thus far, the Democratic Party hasn’t matched the larger advantages in national polling. The so-called generic ballot, which asks people to choose between an unnamed Republican and an unnamed Democrat, shows Democrats averaging about 4% of Republican voters in recent high-quality polls.
But the numbers do recall some of Democrats’ results in the 2018 midterms, which was a strong year for Democrats overall.
Exit polls back then showed Democrats taking double digits’ worth of GOP voters in a number of states — West Virginia (17%), Arizona (12%), Ohio (11%), Pennsylvania (11%) and Wisconsin (10%) — and taking between 5% and 9% in the rest of the key races.
(While Democrats took more than 40 House seats from the GOP and benefitted from a favorable environment in the first midterm election under Trump, they did lose two Senate seats because they were defending some very red states.)
This year, Fox News polling also breaks out Republicans between MAGA Republicans and non-MAGA Republicans. And four Democratic Senate candidates have taken at least 21% of the non-MAGA Republicans: Cooper in North Carolina (21%), Talarico in Texas (22%), Brown in Ohio (25%) and Turek in Iowa (28%).
El-Sayed took 12% of non-MAGA Republicans in Michigan, while Democrats took 12% on the most recent national generic ballot.
And given Trump’s apparent base problems, if Democrats do have a historic night on November 3, that could be a group of voters we’ll be talking a lot about in the aftermath.
