Megyn Kelly Says GOP Defenders Are 'Deluding Themselves' About Fed-Up Voters
Piers Morgan predicted a blue wave and blamed the Iran war. Kelly agreed with him on the war but called the midterms "anybody's race."
Megyn Kelly warned on Wednesday that the Republican Party's defenders have misread why so many of their own voters have turned on them, even as she told her audience the midterms remain too close to call.
Kelly, host of The Megyn Kelly Show, raised the November 3 elections with British broadcaster Piers Morgan, host of Piers Morgan Uncensored. "The midterms right now, you know, if you go by the generic ballot or the latest polls, they don't look good for Republicans," she said.
She then summarized the party's standard reply, "The Republican defense is that they always perform better on election day than the polls suggest and that all these Senate races are within three points," and did not dismiss it. "So it really is anybody's race. We don't know what's going to happen on election day," she said.
"I do think that the Republican defenders are deluding themselves about why so many Republicans and independents are fed up with them." — Megyn Kelly
Piers Morgan Predicts a Blue Wave Over Iran
"I do sense there is going to be a blue wave here," Morgan said. Republicans, he added, are "definitely going to lose the House and they may well lose the Senate."
Morgan called the GOP's position "entirely self-inflicted." He said Trump "wasn't transparent about opening up all the Epstein files, as he said he would be," and pointed to the war: "He invaded a Middle Eastern country, attacked Iran, having said repeatedly, I don't want to do that." Losing Congress, he said, "will be a self-inflicted wound from a terrible decision."
The war's opening strikes came on Feb. 28. Iran's grip on the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world's traded oil and natural gas passed before the war, set off a global energy crisis, NBC Bay Area reported. Morgan said "the diesel prices, the gas prices issue is entirely because of the war in Iran." Kelly answered: "Completely agree."
Kelly said Trump is "now trying to get diesel fuel over here from the Russians, who he's lifting sanctions on just months after he imposed them." On Friday, Trump signed an order waiving most of the Russia-related provisions of a sanctions law he had signed the month before, WJLA reported. "How can any Republican be comfortable?" Kelly asked. "The Ukraine war is not causing our economic problems."
Diesel and Gas Prices Against Trump's Economic Approval
U.S. on-highway diesel averaged $6.28 a gallon this week, up from $3.62 a year earlier, according to the Energy Information Administration. Regular gasoline rose from $3.02 to $4.28, in line with PolitiKool's gas-price tracker.
Dollars a gallon, week of Oct. 19, 2026.
Voters give Trump poor marks on the economy. PolitiKool's polling average shows 29.6 percent of Americans approving of his handling of the economy and 67.9 percent disapproving. His overall approval stands at 37.8 percent in PolitiKool's average.
The crosstabs also back up Kelly's point about independents and Republicans. In a Quinnipiac University poll conducted July 23–27, independents opposed U.S. military action in Iran 69 percent to 26 percent, and only 22 percent of them approved of Trump's job performance. In an AP-NORC poll taken over the same dates, Republican approval of Trump's handling of Iran fell to 61 percent, down from 71 percent in June.
Testing the GOP's Polling-Miss Defense
The defense Kelly described rests on a polling miss of about three points. Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by 8.4 points in PolitiKool's polling average.
The Senate is closer. Democrats lead for Republican-held seats in Iowa by 0.4 points, Kansas by 1.8, Maine by 2.5, Ohio by 3.1, Alaska by 3.4 and Texas by 4.0.
The record on polling misses is mixed. In 2024, national polls taken in the final two weeks understated Trump's support by 2.4 points on average, NBC News found. In the 2022 midterms, the miss went the other way: Democrats beat their Senate polls by a median of 2.1 points, according to the Princeton Election Consortium.
What to Watch Next
With less than two weeks left, the Democratic leads in Iowa, Kansas and Maine are roughly the size of those recent polling misses or smaller. The leads in Ohio, Alaska and Texas are larger than either miss, and the generic-ballot gap is well beyond them. Kelly's warning, though, was about why voters are unhappy, not how big the margins are.