Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson spent the closing stretch before the midterm elections promoting conspiracy theories about polling. Their claims looked foolish before voters cast their ballots, and the election results made those claims look even more detached from reality.

Some Republicans offered conventional explanations for surveys that showed Democrats positioned for major victories. GOP officials argued that polling might undercount Republican voters who were less likely to respond, while others repeated the familiar line that election results are the only polls that matter.

Trump chose a far stranger route. In late August, he claimed that national surveys conducted by major independent news organizations, universities and research institutions were being secretly coordinated by Democrats to discourage Republican voters.

The president presented this supposed scheme as an organized political operation. On his social media platform, Trump declared, “They’re called, ‘Demoralization Operations’” as he attempted to give his conspiracy theory an official sounding name.

Four days before Election Day, Trump continued pushing the same idea during an interview with the New York Post’s Miranda Devine. He said he believed “pollsters don’t even send polls out,” accusing polling professionals of producing results without conducting surveys.

In Trump’s telling, polling professionals simply “sit back behind a desk” and invent numbers. The accusation discarded the possibility that independent surveys were accurately detecting political trouble for Republicans and instead portrayed unfavorable data as inherently fraudulent.

Johnson embraced a similar conspiracy theory in mid October. The House speaker claimed that independent news organizations and independent polling firms were secretly working together to publish deceptive survey results designed to “discourage” Republican voters.

The Louisiana Republican continued the attack as Election Day approached. At a rally in Iowa on Sunday, two days before the elections, Johnson called major media organizations “corrupt” and accused them of deliberately using “fake” polls to manufacture a “narrative.”

Those claims collided with the results. Veteran Pew Research Center pollster Scott Keeter told The Washington Post that surveys conducted before the election largely captured the electorate’s mood, including dissatisfaction with Trump and greater engagement among Democratic supporters.

Keeter said, “Our early observations are that the pre-election polls did a good job telling the story of the electorate’s mood this year: deep dissatisfaction with the president — particularly his economic policies, including among some of his 2024 voters.”

He continued, “Polls also consistently identified a wide ‘enthusiasm gap,’ with Democratic supporters more interested, engaged and likely to show up than Republican supporters.” That assessment matched the broad political story the surveys had presented before voting began.

The polling industry did not perform perfectly. Keeter said surveys appeared to understate Democratic support in many major statewide races for governor and the U.S. Senate, although poll watchers were still evaluating the magnitude of that pattern.

That finding was especially damaging to the Republican conspiracy narrative. The problem was not that polling firms had secretly inflated Democratic strength, but that Democratic candidates frequently performed better than the surveys had indicated.

As part of its election coverage, MS NOW partnered with FiftyPlusOne and reviewed its polling averages from before the election. In most key contests, the surveys correctly identified the eventual winner, but Democratic candidates won by larger margins than anticipated.

The results therefore turned the basic Republican accusation upside down. Rather than manufacturing an illusion of overwhelming Democratic strength, the available polling data made several important races look more competitive than they ultimately proved to be.

Democratic circles had also expressed skepticism about polling reliability during the run up to Tuesday’s contests. As the results settled, the surveys emerged with renewed credibility because they had identified the prevailing political mood and generally pointed to the correct winners.

Trump and Johnson, meanwhile, were left with conspiracy theories that failed their most obvious test. The polls were imperfect, but the election results discredited the claims promoted by two of the nation’s most powerful Republican officials and showed that Democratic strength had been understated rather than fabricated.