Fourteen years ago — just a few days before the 2012 presidential election — I was invited to a little conservative conclave in Arlington, Virginia. The goal was to find a way to infiltrate a potential Mitt Romney administration with movement conservatives. (Romney was perceived to be a bit of an establishment RINO, necessitating this effort.)
Among the dignitaries in attendance, the assumption was that Romney’s victory was a fait accompli. It was only toward the end of the gathering when, as an afterthought, the gentleman running the meeting said something like, “By the way, does anyone think that Gov. Romney will not win the presidency on Tuesday?” Mine was the only hand to go up.
When the meeting ended, one prominent conservative think tanker asked sincerely why I thought Barack Obama would win. “Have you read Tim Carney’s latest column?” I replied. Carney was a conservative who was nevertheless intellectually honest enough to see where things were headed. “He’s really good,” she conceded, as panic swept across her face.
I’ve been thinking about that look of stunned trepidation a lot recently, because I’m wondering if it is about to be repeated on Nov. 3. While many Republicans seem to have grudgingly accepted the inevitability of a blue wave, some prominent voices are loudly proclaiming the opposite.
During a speech in North Carolina last week, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson boldly declared, “The polls are wrong.” Pollsters, he said, “are admitting over the last few weeks that they have been under-sampling Republicans [and] they are over-sampling Democrats … because Republicans don’t trust pollsters anymore.” Johnson has been at this for months: In August, he told Punchbowl News that foreign bettors were skewing prediction markets against the GOP and that Republicans would “substantially” increase their majority.
I want to be clear: The problem is not that Johnson is raising the possibility that there might be some degree of polling error (there certainly could be, and he has every right to say so). The problem is that Johnson is unequivocally stating that “the polls are wrong” — an assertion he cannot factually know to be true. And while anyone who has observed politics in recent years knows that the polls could be wrong, those numbers are hardly the only data points suggesting that Democrats are about to win big. Economic indicators as well as early voting and voter registration numbers all suggest that Nov. 3 is not going to be a happy day for Republicans. Besides, I can’t imagine Donald Trump would be campaigning in Kansas, Alaska or Texas if he didn’t believe those pesky polls.
So why is Johnson pushing this narrative? It’s possible he really does believe the polls are undercounting Republicans. It’s also possible he thinks the job of a leader is to be optimistic, regardless of the facts. Nobody wants a football coach who, with two minutes left in the game, tells his team, “Let’s face it, guys, we’re cooked.” Maybe, Johnson reasons, if Republican voters believe they have a chance to win, they will be more likely to show up and vote. In this way, bullish rhetoric becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (as could defeatist rhetoric).
But the reality is that Johnson’s intent doesn’t much matter. We live in a world where trust in elections is teetering, where the social fabric has eroded, and where an increasing number of Americans are susceptible to delusional and conspiratorial thinking. In such an environment, there are serious consequences for confidently declaring that the entire polling industry is misleading the nation — and thereby raising hope among Republicans that is very likely to soon be dashed.
Which brings me back to 2012. There were legitimate reasons for conservatives at that meeting to think Romney would win (the unemployment rate was nearly 8%!). But there was something else, too. They — and Republican voters across the country — were being told that the polls were “skewed” against Mitt Romney. On Fox News, Dick Morris, a former Bill Clinton consultant turned right-wing pundit, had been informing viewers that Romney would definitely defeat Obama.
I have always suspected that this massive bout of self-delusion had real repercussions: that the shock to Republicans of losing the 2012 election — after having been assured that Romney was on the cusp of victory — contributed to the GOP’s ensuing spiral into insanity. A massive number of Republicans came away from 2012 persuaded that the election had been rigged. These folks, I would argue, then became convinced that no “normal” Republican politician could compete with the liberal media bias and the election-stealing Democrats — and that the only way to win was to turn to someone who was willing to do whatever it took, which is to say that winning necessitated nominating someone like Trump. From there, it was a direct path to the election denial of 2020 and the insurrection of Jan. 6.
Beyond sending many conservatives into the arms of Trump, though, I think what happened in 2012 just fed a general cynicism on the right about American democracy. What happens when the score at the end of the game contradicts everything you’ve seen or heard during the game? It’s easy to imagine the disenchantment, confusion and frustration that follows from voters spending months being convinced that their side is winning, only to one day have cognitive dissonance slap them in the face.
The good news in 2026 is that the blue wave looks “too big to rig.” Maybe for that reason, Johnson is a relatively lonely messenger. During a recent Fox News segment, for example, former George W. Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino pushed back on his claims, asking the speaker, “If you were more on offense, do you think you would be in Texas?”
Still, it’s not crazy to think that Trump will attempt to find some way to call into question the veracity of this election and that Johnson’s statements, intentionally or not, might be softening the ground for that effort. Indeed, according to a recent poll, a majority of Americans do not believe Trump would accept the results if Republicans lose the midterms.
At a time when Americans are disillusioned with our democracy and Republicans seem especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories about election outcomes, Johnson should tread lightly and keep in mind an old conservative axiom: Ideas have consequences.
Matt K. Lewis is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
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