American election pollsters are heading into the 2026 midterm season under mounting scrutiny after a string of high-profile failures, including polls in Democratic primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin that showed double-digit leads that proved entirely illusory on election day. The crisis deepened in August when fabricated poll results — invented by a 21-year-old recent graduate operating a site called Median Strategies — circulated widely in competitive races in Wisconsin, Nevada and Los Angeles before being exposed as fraudulent. The repeated misfires have strengthened the hand of prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which correctly called Donald Trump's 2024 presidential victory while aggregate polls gave a slight edge to his opponent, though the markets themselves stumbled badly in a recent Wisconsin gubernatorial primary where they assigned a 95–96% win probability to the candidate who ultimately lost.