Ohio election boss skewers polling as 'habitutally bad,' suggests surveys undersampling Republicans

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the state's top election officer, says he is concerned that pollsters are chronically undersampling Republicans in the lead up to key elections and that the net effect is that their surveys are turning into "a voter suppression tactic on the left."

"I think the polling is habitually bad. I think some of it is intentionally bad," LaRose said in a weekend podcast on the John Solomon Reports show where he predicted Ohio top of the GOP ticket wth Vivek Ramaswamy for governor and John Husted for U.S. Senate will win despite polls suggesting it is a razor-tight race.

"I've been around in the military and the special operations command. I've been around a lot of political campaigns, and so I know that a lot of times people have pretty wild imaginations about what they think goes on," he added, "But I started to think that some of these polls are intentionally bad. I think that they're intentionally undersampling Republicans.

"They're miscalculating their voter turnout models, and I think it's, call it what it is, a voter suppression tactic on the left. They think that they can sap our energy and enthusiasm by coming out with these goofy polls telling us that our guys are about to lose," he added.

Editor's Note: John Solomon is working as an unpaid Special Government Employee as the chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force and has taken a leave of absence as Editor-in-Chief of Just the News while he serves in that role.

The Republican secretary noted that in 2024 polls that have Ramaswamy and Husted trailing "are the exact same polls that two years ago predicted that (Democrat) Sherrod Brown was going to beat Bernie Moreno. Well, guess what? He didn't. It didn't happen."

LaRose said if the polls are wrong again in 2026 it will be imperative to have a post-mortem at government levels to call out errant polling and understand its roots. He added, though, government options to impose a fix tin may be limited because of the Constitution's free-speech guarantees.

"I would ask that question to some of our great conservative constitutional scholars. I am not a constitutional scholar. I'm not even a lawyer," he said. "But I would say that it's an interesting question. I do happen to think that even bad polling tends to be protected by the First Amendment. But I'll tell you what, they're doing great damage to their credibility over and over again. 

He added: "It's normal to do a sort of post mortem if you lose and deconstruct what went wrong, and and the party does a a bit of soul searching and whatever else. Well, I think we're going to win. I think we should do a bit of a post-mortem after we win this. I'm talking about into late November and December, and point out to people, 'hey, you remember these polls? Yeah. You remember all of these polls that said we were going to lose? Look at what really happened. Did you see how biased the media was/''

LaRose's concerns were echoed in a series of stories published by The Washington Post this weekend that noted pollsters in places like Kansas are having serious difficulty getting Republicans to answer surveys, creating potential inaccuracies that could be exposed on Election Day if Republicans outperform the polls.

"As the midterm campaign cycle wraps up, polls released this week came with a caution for Democrats against celebrating before Election Day," it said in one article which called polling in South Carolina's Senate race a :"canary in the poll mine."

The newspaper went into great detail on the problems with the Kasnas Senate poll in a historically red state.

"After more than 85,000 phone calls and nearly 50,000 text messages, a potential problem emerged," it reported. "Democrats were far more enthusiastic about taking the poll than Republicans were. Registered Democrats were more than twice as likely as registered Republicans to complete the survey after answering an interviewer’s call — 32 percent versus 12 percent — with a similar partisan gap when texting voters to complete the survey online.

"This was a supersize version of a concern that has vexed pollsters for the last decade," the Post acknowledged.

President Donald Trump's longtime pollster and adviser, John McLaughlin, told Just the News like LaRose the media pollsters are too willing to release flawed polls.

"I think it's deliberate because a lot of the media that covers those polls has a bias," he said on the Just the News, No Noise television show.

"It seems like they're doubling down on the bad polls in this election cycle because when you get into the internals of the polls, they just don't make sense," he continued. "They don't match up with the electorate, what they're going to look like in a midterm election."

Veteran pollster Scott Rasmussen said many races that showed Democrats comfortably ahead back in September have since tightened into the margin of error as Trump has tirelessly crisscrossed the country and Republicans injected nearly $1 billion in spending into late ads and get-out-the-vote operations.

Rasmussen created a tool on Lyceum, an opinion site owned by Just the News' parent company, that allows everyday Americans to adjust pollsters' predictions in key races and see what would happen if the surveys are wrong.

"There are races and seats that Republicans never thought would be this close. And if Republicans can do well in those races, they will control the Senate. I think big picture, Dems heavily favored in the House, the Senate too close to call. It will be decided by a handful of voters in a handful of states."