The Hungarian Polls, a final update

 

Prepared by Tamás Bodor, University of Wisconsin, and Claire Durand. Université de Montréal

All votes have now been counted for the 2026 Hungarian national election. According to the final tally, Tisza won 53.5% of the votes, which amounts to a 14.7-point lead over Fidesz (38.9%.) This final tally, however, is not suitable for assessing the performance of pre-election polls: it includes over 300,000 mail-in ballots cast by members of the Hungarian diaspora and nearly 85,000 in-person absentee votes cast abroad, which were not included in the sampling frames of the polls.

As our Hungarian colleague Gábor Tóka pointed out, our first report on April 13 was based on a preliminary vote count that was not yet sufficiently accurate. First, by the time we obtained the preliminary count on April 13, most mail-in ballots were already included in the total. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of domestically cast absentee ballots had not yet been counted. While the former, the diaspora ballots, heavily favored Fidesz, the latter were strongly favorable to Tisza.

For our updated report, we are now using the final tally from which we excluded mail-in votes. Moreover, we also excluded in-person absentee votes cast abroad. We assumed that these 85,000 absentee votes favored Tisza 63% to Fidesz’s 31%, just as the outstanding votes as of April 13 did. Accordingly, we estimate that Tisza received 55.65% of the domestic votes, while Fidesz received 36.40%, amounting to a 19.25-point victory for Tisza domestically. We believe that these figures correspond most closely to the poll’s sampling frame. They are very similar to Gábor Tóka’s estimate of April 14 (55.7-36.3) and to the Wikipedia estimate of the constituency vote (55.3-36.7).

With these new numbers, our conclusion has changed. The new estimates are presented in the following table:

This shows that Medián and 21 Kutatóközpont who had “boosted” the difference between Tisza and Fidesz in their likely voter model were right. Their estimates are closer to the comparable election results. Overall, excluding McLaughlin, who is clearly an outlier, the polls overestimated Fidesz by an average of 3.3 points and underestimated Tisza by 1.8 points, and at least one of their estimates is outside their margin of error (except for Median and 21 Kutatóközpont). This could be partly due to pollsters’ caution, given their underestimation of Fidesz in 2022. This could also be due to voters, given the very high turnout.

Conclusion:

Our first concern was to see what would happen as the campaign went on, since two groups of pollsters published contradictory estimates. The answer: All pollsters whose estimates showed a Fidesz lead earlier, except one, -, stopped publishing weeks before the election, which speaks for itself. The one exception: McLaughlin & Associates, maintained that Fidesz led Tisza using an in-person survey, which also speaks for itself.

Our second concern was the performance of the new polling methods.  These new methods varied and accounted for most polls published in April. We did not find any substantial and systematic differences according to the mode of administration and sampling source, as the two are related.

Our last point is about the proportion of undecideds, in fact non-disclosers, that is, all the respondents who do not inform their preferences. This proportion remained quite high until the end, regardless of the mode used. This may partially explain the difference between the polls’ estimates and the votes.

Best,

Claire Durand and Tamás Bodor