Pollsters’ Miscalculations Expose Deep Divides in Key Elections

By Sandy Fitzgerald | Wednesday, 05 November 2025 10:50 AM EST
Pollsters underestimated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s enduring influence in New York City while overestimating the strength of Republican candidates in several other key races, longtime GOP strategist and pollster Dustin Olson said Wednesday on Newsmax. Appearing on “Wake Up America,” Olson, who also hosts the “Political Trade Secrets” podcast, said results from elections in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia show that “a lot of pollsters were doing 2021 models when it was more like a 2017 election.”
“In New York City, people underestimated what Cuomo might be able to pull off and also overestimated [democratic socialist Zohran] Mamdani,” Olson said. Olson pointed to problems in public polling, saying many survey firms rely too heavily on online panels, where respondents are paid to take surveys, rather than traditional voter outreach. “We call it panel trash, and a lot of those polls were done that way,” he said.
Olson also noted that political campaigns have been muddying the waters by pushing out their own polls for public consumption. “There’s a weird thing that’s been going on in politics ever since probably the ’24 primaries, where people are trying to pay to get their own polls,” he said. “Every camp is trying to get their poll out.” Turning to New Jersey, Olson said the state’s results weren’t particularly surprising, despite widespread voter frustration. “It’s a blue state,” he said. “Off-year elections traditionally go to the party that’s not in the White House, and we saw that happen, but the margins were larger than anybody expected.”
Even so, Olson noted that Democrats performed better than predicted in New Jersey and Virginia, saying “a two-point or a 10-plus margin is going to be good for Democrats.” On California’s Proposition 50, which allows the state to redraw congressional districts in a move critics decry as partisan, Olson warned that the nation’s redistricting battles are turning into political “warfare.” “Both sides pursue it,” he said. “Arguably, Texas started this round. … It does become troubling for a lot of Americans.” Olson added that many Californians supported the measure, believing they were “protecting democracy,” even though it effectively overturned a previous constitutional amendment that created an independent redistricting commission.