In 2016, the final Marquette Law School poll, considered the best in Wisconsin, had Hillary Clinton up six points in the state.
Donald Trump won Wisconsin.
In 2020, one major national poll had Joe Biden ahead in Wisconsin by 17. Biden won by less than a point.
So when the polls heading into Tuesday say Democrats are cruising, Wisconsin voters have earned the right to roll their eyes.
The numbers look rough for Republicans on paper. The national generic ballot average has Democrats up almost nine points. Marquette's latest poll has Democrat David Crowley leading Republican Tom Tiffany 51% to 44% in the governor's race among likely voters. Early voting returns show Democrats casting more ballots so far.
Michael Alfonso doesn't believe a word of it.
"I know I'm only 26 years old, but I've never seen a poll that was real," said the Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin's 7th District. "Every single one is fake."
That's an exaggeration. His underlying point isn't. "Republicans don't answer polls," he says, and there's a decade of evidence behind him.
Polling depends on one assumption: the people who pick up the phone look like the people who show up to vote. For the last ten years, that hasn't been true. The voters most likely to back Republicans, especially rural, working-class voters without college degrees, are among the least likely to talk to a pollster. Pollsters know it. They reweight their samples to make up for it and still come up short. The misses in 2016 and 2020 were among the biggest in decades.
Look at Marquette's latest survey. Republicans made up just 36% of its sample of registered voters.
Alfonso says he's talked to voters all over his district and hasn't met one who got a polling call. That's a story, not a statistic, but it fits everything the misses of the last decade have shown.
The early voting numbers have the same problem. Republicans have spent years being told mail ballots and early voting couldn't be trusted, and many of them now vote in person on Election Day. That makes early returns look bluer than the final count. It happened in 2024: Democrats jumped out to an early lead in the returns, then Republicans flooded the polls on Election Day and won.
Republicans have also been quietly gaining ground where it counts, adding voters to the rolls in key battleground states over the last several years.
None of that shows up in a poll of 818 people taken two weeks before the election.
Alfonso's own race shows how much a poll misses. He's running to replace Sean Duffy, now Trump's Transportation Secretary, in a district Trump won easily. Trump has endorsed him. Decision Desk HQ gives him a 94% chance of beating Democrat Fred Clark. He says the voters he meets are "excited to get out and vote not just for their futures, but their kids' futures and their grandkids' futures."
The people who knock on doors, show up at rallies and stand in line on Election Day tend to ignore calls from numbers they don't recognize. Pollsters have spent a decade trying to fix that, and it keeps catching them off guard.
Wisconsin voters go to the polls Tuesday. In 2016 and 2020, the experts were sure they knew how the state would vote, and both times the result surprised them.