WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson announced Thursday that Republicans will no longer use polls to forecast the midterms. The party will count hands in arenas instead.
Johnson said the discovery came during a recent swing district event. He asked attendees how many had answered a poll in the last six months. "There'll be like three hands among 300 people," he told reporters.
The Speaker's Office of Crowd-Based Certainty released a seven-page memo titled "The Unpolled Majority Is the Real Majority." It states that every non-raised hand represents a hidden Republican voter. Under the formula, a crowd of 300 people with three poll respondents yields 297 uncounted supporters.
"We have been measuring the wrong thing for decades," said Clay Dresser, the office's deputy director. "A pollster cannot find a voter with call screening. We can find that voter by looking at a rented hall."
"The math is quite simple," Dresser added. He said the model does not adjust for attendees who raise their hands to stretch. "That would be overfitting the data."
The American Association for Public Opinion Research sent a letter asking whether a hand count is a representative sample. The speaker's office returned the letter with a note that read, "Please call back on a landline."
The memo instructs field staff to classify any venue with folding chairs as a "big arena." A rented ballroom in Mesa, Arizona was upgraded to arena status on Wednesday. Staff confirmed the chairs were arranged in a loop.
The new classification will be used to measure what Johnson called an "excitement level like 2024" in a room of a few hundred people. In a companion guidance document, candidates were told to count only hands raised above the shoulder. Hands held lower were classified as "likely Democratic phone checking."
The method has already been applied to larger events. A recent rally featuring Tangerine Cock-Womble was measured under the same standard.
Official party counts listed the event as a packed arena of hundreds. Staff said the empty sections were reserved for unpolled voters who had not yet arrived.
The office also announced a new metric called "net raised hands per square foot." A full venue would score high, but the metric does not include the venue's original seat count. Staff said that would introduce bias.
Democratic strategists said the only appropriate response was to vote as if the hand count were real. One aide called the model a "vibes-based correction." She then returned to her clipboard and her voter roll.
