Foreign Policy and the 2026 Midterms

LINDSAY:
Election day is less than a week away, and the stakes are enormous. For two years, Republicans have controlled both the White House and Congress. Democrats have been on the outside looking in as policy issues are being decided.

But now control of Congress is up for grabs. Democrats need to pick up three seats in the House, or four in the Senate, to return Washington to divided government. If Democrats do win control of the House, or both the House and the Senate, they will gain greater say over domestic and foreign policy.

The majority party in the House and Senate decides who chairs congressional committees, what issues those committees will focus on, which bills get to the floor for a vote, and which do not. The majority party in the Senate also determines whether presidential nominations for positions in the executive branch and on the federal courts get a vote. That potential power shift is why the Democratic and Republican parties are pulling out all the stops in the waning days of this election season to turn out the vote for their candidates.

But what is on voters’ minds as they head to the polls? How do pocketbook issues such as jobs and gas prices rank alongside foreign policy issues such as Iran, Ukraine, and Israel? As talk about rigged elections and foreign meddling swirls, do Americans have confidence that the election results will reflect the votes they cast?

And how are party affiliation and age shaping what Americans see as the challenges facing the country? To get answers to these questions, I sat down with Hannah Hartig and Jessica Huseman. Hannah is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center, where she primarily studies U.S. political attitudes and voting behavior. Jessica is editorial director at Votebeat, which provides nonpartisan local reporting on elections and voting. She was previously the lead elections reporter for ProPublica and has covered several federal election cycles. Hannah and Jessica, thank you for joining me on the President’s Inbox.

HARTIG:
Thanks for having me.

LINDSAY:
Thanks so much. Hannah, I would like to start with you. We are less than a week from Election Day, though I should note that the University of Florida Election Lab calculates that more than 30 million Americans have already voted, whether through mail-in ballots or with early in-person voting.

How would you describe the mood of the American electorate on the eve of Election Day?

HARTIG:
Voters are gearing up to cast their midterm ballots, or as you note, have already done so. And the mood is sour. Americans are viewing the national economy in poor terms.

They say the country is off on the wrong track. Donald Trump, in his second term, has the lowest approval rating that he’s had since taking office in 2025. And I will note that it’s much lower than it was in 2018, right before the midterms that year.

So voters are not in great spirits as we head into Election Day.

LINDSAY:
So the general mood is sour. Are there particular issues that seem to be animating voters? And how might it differ across parties or among age groups?

HARTIG:
So one common theme that we’re seeing, and not just in Pew Research Center polling, but in various other polls, is that people are really concerned about the cost of living, the cost of health care, food and groceries, housing. And this year, we also have seen a dramatic increase in the share of voters who are concerned about gas and diesel. This is bipartisan concern, so majorities of Republican voters and Democratic voters are concerned about these things.

But there are a myriad of other issues that we can point to as well. As has been true for quite some time, Republicans tend to be more concerned about things like violent crime and immigration, although those have subsided a bit in Trump’s second term. And Democrats are generally more concerned about things like health care or abortion, for example.

But really, the story this year is the economy.

LINDSAY:
Jessica, you have covered several elections. Does what Hannah is describing jibe with what you’re seeing out on the campaign trail?

HUSEMAN:
You know, I think it is. And I think one of the clearest examples of this is that, you know, the mood is sour, but I think for a lot of people, that is translating to eagerness to get out to the polls and to do so earlier than we might have anticipated. We’ve reported that in Wisconsin, for example, people are choosing not to mail their ballots back because they want to go and they want to vote that day and they do not trust the mail.

In Texas, we’re seeing pretty astounding turnout in a midterm cycle in certain voter groups in Texas that have not really turned out to the polls reliably in a number of years. And so I think that while the mood is pretty sour, what that translates to on the ground is that people are very eager to cast their ballot.

LINDSAY:
I will note for people who like numbers, the average voter turnout in a midterm election is roughly 43%. So that may be a number to pay attention to after Election Day to see just how energized voters were. On that issue, Hannah, we’re going to be talking a lot about polling in our conversation.

And I know there’s a lot of distrust out there in the American electorate about the accuracy of polling and people have a reason to have complaints. In the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections, polls notably undercounted support for Donald Trump. My sense is that polls have been better in midterm elections, but by no means perfect.

So give me your assessment of how much faith people should be putting in these polls, given that track record.

HARTIG:
I’m always so happy to get this question during election time because I think it’s really important for people to understand what polls can do and what polls cannot do, or the limitation of polling. Polling really is a snapshot in time. It’s meant to understand where people feel, where they sit on issues, on their lives, on government, a variety of topics at that moment in time.

There’s imprecision in even the best, most accurate polls, you know, probability polls, polls that are random samples. We can talk about sort of the hallmarks of a good poll for those who might be interested, but the complicated factor here, as we’re sitting, you know, less than a week from the midterms, is trying to understand who is going to turn out. As you know, Jim, just 43%, somewhere around the 40s, that share of registered people turn out to vote.

So that means a whole lot of people won’t. And trying to understand who’s going to ultimately turn out and who won’t is actually why election polling in particular is so hard to do. The mood that individuals have, let alone a group of voters, might have changes day to day.

The news changes day to day. Personal things can prevent someone from casting a ballot. And polls try, and they do pretty well at capturing that uncertainty, but it’s still imprecise.

The other thing that I want to mention is that there’s always a margin of error associated with every poll, meaning every estimate that you see has a margin of error. Usually it’s about three percentage points, but it varies. A good poll will tell you.

And so if you see a race, for example, that shows candidate A has 51% and candidate B has 49%, that means it’s a statistical tie. Really, any candidate could pull it off. So there’s just so much that goes along with polling that I hope the public really understands.

But generally, Jim, I would say that pollsters are acutely aware of these things, and they want to get it right. Good pollsters want to get the results right. And pollsters have made a number of changes over the years.

Absolutely an issue with missing Trump support in the polls. That’s been something that we’ve consistently found as pollsters since 2016. It’s less of a problem when Trump is not directly on the ballot.

But of course, pollsters are still paying attention to these dynamics in a year like this when his name is not listed on the ballot as well.

LINDSAY:
Hannah, I want to put you on the spot and ask for a quick tutorial on how to be a good consumer of polls. And I really want to ask you about two things. One, tell me a bit about the difference between polls of American adults, polls of registered voters, and polls of likely voters.

That’s the first part. Second part, what I’d like you to do is just sort of touch upon, to what extent should people be looking for averages of national polls rather than individual poll results?

HARTIG:
Great. Yes, absolutely. So, on your first question, American adults, generally speaking, when you’re looking at a poll, is it a probability-based poll?

Meaning, does every American adult have equal chance of selection? How were those people recruited to join that survey? Was it by mail?

Was it on the phone? I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of probability versus non-probability polling. There’s some disagreement in the community about the quality of those polls.

But on this other group, registered voters, generally speaking, in a survey, a pollster can ask, are you currently registered to vote at your current address? That’s usually a self-report. There are other ways of doing this.

If a poll matches, for example, its respondents to a voter file, it could confirm their registration at their address. But essentially, it’s asking a question on a survey, are you registered to vote at your address to the best of your knowledge? And then subsetting that survey to those people, that’s your registered voter poll.

We report on them all the time. Now, likely voters, that’s getting into people’s special sauce. There’s no one question or set of questions that gets at this.

There’s the propensity to vote. Some people will ask, how motivated are you to vote? Have you voted before in a midterm election?

Some people will, as I mentioned, match that sample to a voter file and confirm that that person’s voted before. There’s all sorts of combinations of ways to do this, and that’s why you do see some differential results being reported in the lead-up to election day. But that really is, like, the secret sauce of different pollsters weighting teams and how they come up with these results.

Your second question, oh, averages. Yes, that’s, I think, a great point, Jim. I think it’s always good to, if you can, go to a reputable source, look at the average of a certain state or, you know, the U.S. House generic ballot, and that gives you a sort of a smooth line, if you will. It helps contextualize outliers that you might see and just gives you a better sense of the broader trend, because every poll has an error associated with it. So when you sort of combine those polls, you’re smoothing out some of the errors, the idea. So it’s a great idea.

LINDSAY:
Jessica, I want to bring you in on this question, if you could sort of tell us a little bit about how you, as a reporter, use polls and how they shape your reporting, if they do at all.

HUSEMAN:
Absolutely. So we use polls in kind of an interesting way, and I will say that we are so, we’re so fortunate as an organization that explicitly does not cover the horse race of it all.

LINDSAY:
And we should define horse race as who’s leading in which race.

HUSEMAN:
Exactly. So, you know, we are not the site you’re going to come to if you want somebody to explain a poll to you. It would have to be a pretty specific poll for us to explain it, right?

Like, we might write a story about a poll about Americans’ confidence in elections, but we’re not going to write a story about a poll about the outcome of a given race. But we are very fortunate to have Nathaniel Rakich as our managing editor, and he was at FiveThirtyEight for a long time and just knows polls so well. And so we have this internal oracle that can help us do all of the fact-checking and sort of rigor checks that Hannah is encouraging here.

And so we’re really fortunate to have that. And so the way that his expertise comes to bear for us is mostly in figuring out where to put our reporters on election day. And so we know we’ve covered election administration and voting challenges and post-election litigation for long enough to know that the places that these entities are going to focus in on for challenges, for lawsuits, are the places that are close, are the places that a lot of people are paying attention to.

And the polls are obviously our window into that. And so if we’re looking at the entire state of Wisconsin, for example, and choosing where to put our reporter on election night, the polls are a huge part of that calculation.

LINDSAY:
Okay. You have anticipated my next question, Jessica, which is to talk about the issue of election integrity. I want to begin first with you, Hannah.

Give me a sense of how confident American voters are in their electoral system. Are they happy with it? Do they think it is accurate and fair?

And then we’ll talk about how things are going to be playing out at the grassroots level in terms of trying to carry out elections.

HARTIG:
Yeah, so before every election, Pew Research Center conducts a survey to get a sense of how Americans are feeling about election administration, the process of casting their vote. Do they think it will be accurate? Will election workers do things by the book?

Will mail ballots reach the Postal Service and the Vote Counting Office in time to be counted? Things of that nature. This year, we found in a hopeful vein that a majority of voters are confident that U.S. elections will be run and administered well. They’re also confident that once all the ballots are counted, we will know which party won control of the House and that election workers will act fairly and properly. However, that top-line finding does obscure some interesting nuggets that we found in our poll this year. One of those is that Republicans are far less confident that if non-citizens try to cast a ballot, they will be stopped.

Democrats are overwhelmingly confident that non-citizen voters will be prevented from casting their ballots. Republican voters, not so much. On the other side, you have Democrats being less confident that all legally qualified people will be able to cast a ballot if they want to and they try to.

Republicans are much more confident that that can happen. And those things are a little bit in tension with one another. The other thing is, Democrats are, even though a majority are confident that things should go well, they’re less confident than they were two years ago in 2024.

Republicans are more confident that the election will go well. And these partisan dynamics unfortunately now, I think, have become a major part of our election system. We saw this after 2020, of course.

And even, you know, in 2016, Republicans feeling less confident that votes would be counted accurately. But after Trump won, their confidence went up. So that’s an unfortunate part of our election system now, but we’ll see what happens.

LINDSAY:
If I can, I just want to follow up on that really with two questions, Hannah. One is, you mentioned that there’s been movement in opposite direction by Democrats and Republicans in terms of their faith. Is that movement significant?

I mean, you began by talking earlier about margins of error. So I’m just trying to get a sense of how big the delta, the changes that you’re referring to. And my second question is, getting back to a point that’s already been raised about people’s concerns that if they have a mail-in ballot and hand it over to the United States Postal Service that it won’t get delivered.

Do we know, has anyone asked whether people are concerned because they’ve just lost faith in the USPS as an institution to deliver the mail, period? Or is it tied to a judgment that they believe the Postal Service is wading into the election business in deliberately delaying the delivery of ballots?

HARTIG:
So, on your first question, absolutely, that change among Democrats is significant. Meaning, statistically, in 2024, before that election, I think over 90% of Democrats were confident that elections would be fair, run well. Today, that’s 72.

In our world, sort of how we would contextualize that is that significant, but maybe not substantive. You know, a majority still have confidence, but it has dropped, and that’s something we pay attention to. And it is notable.

And similar story among Republicans. It’s risen, but it’s not sky-high, and it’s not, you know, it’s not the kind of change that we might feature prominently. This year, we are seeing some interesting movement in overall confidence in mail balloting, and what we’re seeing is that Democrats are still more confident than Republicans that absentee ballots and mail ballots will be counted as voters intend, but Democratic confidence has declined significantly since 2024, and that drop was really one of the most surprising results.

Not necessarily surprising, but one of the biggest that I saw in the survey that was notable. On our survey, we did ask people if they were confident that mail ballots would be delivered in time to be counted by the U.S. Postal Service, and we found that most people were confident, though there was a little bit of a partisan indifference there. I can’t speak to whether that’s a general dislike of USPS, the politicization of USPS in recent years, or the specific issue, but I will say this survey was conducted after that Supreme Court decision, where they had to weigh in and say that the United States Postal Service was required to deliver those.

LINDSAY:
Jessica, I want to turn to the practicalities of conducting elections. Hannah just laid out that most Americans remain confident in election security. I hear, at least from some local election officials, that there are significant concerns.

So I have to ask you, is my understanding correct, and if it is correct, what are they concerned about?

HUSEMAN:
Yeah, you know, I think that the thing that I’m hearing most often from election administrators is that they are really concerned that they don’t understand what the federal government is going to do on any given day, right? And I think that lack of consistency has become an operational problem for a lot of election administrators. So it used to be, prior to 2017, when elections were designated as critical infrastructure for the United States, that the federal government was basically hands off in elections entirely.

That has changed rapidly over the course, not just of the two Trump administrations, but over the waning days of the Obama administration and during the Biden era. The federal government has taken much more responsibility, or did take much more responsibility, for things like cyber security assessments, physical security assessments, making sure that places were migrating onto .gov so that their cybersecurity infrastructure that was public-facing was better. That has all gone away in Trump 2.0. So they’re unpredictable in the sense that they are no longer providing what, over the last few years, states and counties have become accustomed to them providing. But then also, while choosing not to involve themselves in those ways, have asserted authority over elections either just because they said it out loud, or because they have made actual moves to inject themselves into these spaces. You know, we’ve got a lawsuit in California right now over allegedly 20,000 non-citizens that they may or may not have found on the rolls. And so I think that election officials are frustrated because on one hand, the federal government used to be very helpful, and they’re refusing to do those things.

And they are spending that energy instead involving themselves in things that there is no precedent at all for them to have been involved in. And so we’re in this situation in which election administrators are being forced to train poll workers on totally unprecedented scenarios. You know, I think it is shocking to me that thousands of poll workers across the country have been told what to do if an armed ICE agent shows up at the polls.

That’s really concerning. That’s a crazy thing that I’ve just said to you. And I think that states and counties are trying to figure out how to exist in this new reality.

LINDSAY:
Let me jar you out on that a little bit, Jessica. There’s been a lot of talk about foreign governments running influence operations, and it’s pretty clear the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and maybe some other countries have been doing so, certainly since 2016 when the Russians sort of made the use of social media a way to sow distrust, spread disinformation and misinformation. But there’s a separate issue about election interference, which is either disrupting a vote, say by shutting down computer systems so you can’t actually look up and see if somebody is registered, or interfering with a vote count.

When you talk to state and local election officials, are they expressing any concerns that that risk is going up?

HUSEMAN:
No, they aren’t. You know, I think one of the great successes in the last decade for election administration has been one, to shore up all of these systems. Like our voter registration systems writ large across the country are significantly more secure than they were even five years ago.

The focus that we did have for a little while, and I will say that like most of it came during the first Trump administration, when DHS was particularly active in shoring up these systems and helping to improve them. During that process, states were really bought in to the idea that they needed to do a better job securing these things. They have new voter registration systems.

They have increased security around login and access. They have deeply developed chain of custody procedures. And so I think all of these things should make us feel really good about where we are.

I am personally not concerned about the possibility or even like the plausibility of a foreign actor infiltrating systems in any large way that would meaningfully affect the way that we tabulate the votes.

LINDSAY:
Hannah, I would be remiss in my duties as the host not to ask you about how foreign policy issues are playing into the midterm election. Are they a big deal? A middling deal?

Or voters aren’t thinking about foreign policy, they’re just really worried about pocketbook issues?

HARTIG:
So this is really interesting. When we ask voters about the types of issues that are important to their vote this fall, foreign policy just as a general term ranks somewhere in the middle for Republicans and Democrats. I will say it has risen as an issue for Democratic voters since the past two elections, 2022 and 2024, which I think is telling.

But the way that I see this playing out, right, is that sharp rise in the share who are concerned about gas and diesel prices. Voters are sort of internalizing I think what is going on, particularly with Iran, vis-a-vis pocketbook issues. So I do think that it’s on voters’ radar and the extent to which they blame Trump for the rise in gas and diesel prices, which is a question.

I do think you see it playing out in the midterms. In our recent survey that we conducted, we also did ask about Iran and a higher share disapprove of the war in Iran, a higher share say it was the wrong decision to start a conflict with Iran, and that includes Democrats and Republicans holding this view. So I think it is an interesting question of how it is shaping the midterms.

LINDSAY:
What about other foreign policy issues, Hannah? I think of tariffs, which I think would qualify as a foreign policy issue or certainly a foreign economic policy issue. Ukraine in support for Israel.

HARTIG:
Yes, those are all very thorny issues for the public. I think for tariffs, viewed in highly partisan terms, of course. Differential impacts in different parts of the country, which is why you see different candidates, Republican or Democrat, sort of amplifying that issue or trying not to amplify that issue in certain areas, you know, thinking about the Midwest and, of course, the northern border states with Canadian tariffs.

So I think Americans, once again, like Iran, are really viewing this as having some kind of hit on their own pocketbook. And so once again, an economic concern for sure. Ukraine continues to fascinate me personally.

We’ve been tracking this, of course, since the breakout of the war. And I think that Trump’s de-emphasis of this issue, certainly not Europe or Ukraine doing that, but Trump’s decision that this is not going to be important to the United States has sort of dampened it as a top campaign issue. We didn’t ask about it explicitly on our survey, but we know, again, that it’s highly partisan.

Democrats are more likely to say the U.S. has a responsibility to help Ukraine, that the U.S. is not providing enough support to Ukraine, that Trump is favoring Russia too much. Republicans are on the other side of that coin, unfortunately. And so this is one area I will be very interested to see what happens.

And that’s your area of expertise, Jim, as a result of the midterm, sort of what happens with Ukraine.

LINDSAY:
Hannah, let me just ask you about Israel specifically, because it has become an issue, certainly in Democratic primaries. And I’ve heard arguments that actually, if you look at the results of traditional questions about U.S. support for Israel, that we’re seeing a generational divide opening up, that younger Americans are less supportive of Israel than older Americans. And of course, if that is true, it’s hard to know how that will play into actual elections, since my political scientist friends who study elections will tell you younger people are far less likely to turn out to vote than older people.

But just give me a sense of what the polling data is telling us on that score.

HARTIG:
Sure. So we actually haven’t updated our numbers on the Israel-Gaza situation for some time, but it’s sort of what you suggest. There’s a fault line on the Democratic side, particularly with younger, more liberal, more educated Democrats who feel more strongly that the U.S. has been too supportive of Israel, that they’ve not provided enough support to Palestine, to Gaza. And so there is this sort of internal struggle going on, where there’s more moderate Democrats, older Democrats, especially concentrated in the Midwest, when I’m thinking about how this plays out in the midterm, that aren’t quite as upset about the amount of support the U.S. has given to Israel. I think what a very interesting question is, though, is how that does play out at the ballot box. As you mentioned, younger voters are less likely to turn out as it is.

In this election, there’s some signs that they’re super fired up and eager to sort of turn the page in Congress. And so how does that play out for voters? Do they decide that this issue is so important to them that they couldn’t support a Democrat who, say, might be vocally supportive of Israel?

Is it going to cause some sort of split-ticket issue in some states? I really don’t know, but it’s something that I’m going to be watching on election night for sure.

LINDSAY:
Jessica, I want to come to you and ask you, as you talk to voters and you talk to people in your newsroom, what is the thinking about foreign policy? We have a general sense of what polls tell us the mood is, but what is it that you’re feeling at a ground level?

HUSEMAN:
You know, I think that something Hannah said earlier kind of sticks out to me. I think that the foreign policy topics, as sort of we talk about them at this level, that’s not really how people think about them day on day. You know, when we talk about the Iran war, they hear gas prices.

When we talk about tariffs, they see rising grocery prices or the fact that they can’t sell their products as farmers in some of the states.

LINDSAY:
So they’re focused on the consequences of foreign policy decisions?

HUSEMAN:
They’re absolutely focused on the consequences of foreign policy decisions. And as our reporters have gone to sort of talk to people at the polls, that’s often what we hear is motivating them to turn their ballot in as early as possible. Those are the type of turnout stories that we’ve been writing lately.

Like, go to the polls, see why people are participating as early as they are or why they’re choosing to vote in person instead of by mail, right? That’s our story. That’s what we will be writing about as a policy topic.

But in having those conversations, people are telling us, like, I’m voting this early because of X. And most often, you’re hearing gas prices and affordability. And I think at their core, those are, of course, foreign policy issues in this administration.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I’m going to close up this episode of the President’s Inbox. My guests have been Hannah Hartig, a Senior Researcher at Pew Research Center, and Jessica Huseman, Editorial Director at Votebeat. Thank you, Hannah and Jessica, for joining me.

HUSEMAN:
Thank you so much. Thank you.

LINDSAY:
Today’s episode was produced by Justin Schuster with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra.

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain errors.