I have not answered an unknown number since 2019. According to the speaker of the House, that makes me a national security problem.

On Fox News Sunday, Speaker Mike Johnson delivered the news Republicans have been workshopping all fall: the midterm polls are “wrong — all of them,” because they are “using faulty analysis”. His explanation was simpler and stranger than the accusation. Pollsters, he said, cannot reach Republicans. Republicans do not answer. The sample is therefore broken, the Democratic wave is a spreadsheet accident, and the republic stands.

Let’s grant the premise, because the premise is unimpeachable: I don’t answer either. Neither does anyone under 45, anyone over 75, and everyone between who has learned what a ringtone now means. Phone polling in 2026 is performed on a population that treats ringing as spam regardless of intent, and the response rate is so low that a poll is less a census than a support group for people who still pick up. The speaker has, without noticing, identified the only election irregularity the Federal Communications Commission can actually help with.

Then watch what happens to the logic. A political movement whose supporters are invisible to every measuring instrument is, scientifically speaking, indistinguishable from a movement that isn’t there. But science is not the point. Politically, a movement that is invisible to pollsters and visible at rallies is indistinguishable from a movement that is very large and very annoyed — and annoyance, unlike a sample, does not require the caller to get through. The Republican wave exists precisely because no one can prove it doesn’t. It has achieved the perfect campaign position: uncounted and undefeated.

The Democrats deserve their turn at the mirror. Their supporters answer the phone in numbers pollsters once mistook for enthusiasm, which is how twenty years of polls leaned the way the volunteers leaned. A party of people who answer the phone and a party of people who don’t, polling each other, is not a science. It’s a phone tree of grievances, and the host of the tree — the industry itself — keeps dialing at 6:45 on Tuesday evenings, the hour every American is officially available, which tells you the industry is not studying the country so much as maintaining a hobby.

Arlene Kost, who runs a polling firm that asked us not to name her polling firm, put it with the honesty of a woman billing by the interview: “We call four hundred people to talk to the two who pick up. The two who pick up are the two who like being asked. Your poll is a focus group with extra math.”

So here is the column’s policy proposal, offered for the midterms and all future elections: both parties, answer the phone. The Democrats will call you about healthcare. The Republicans will call you about inflation. And at the end, the caller will ask, with the last hope of the profession, how you identify. And when both sides finally admit they’ve been ignoring the phone out of principle, the poll will release, and the pundit will say the numbers are wrong, and the numbers will be right for exactly the same reasons. The only truly accurate poll in America is the one nobody can get through to. My number has been unlisted since 2019. My polling record has been perfect.