Not true. Republican candidates may have "gotten the tar beat out of them," but none that was forecast to win by the polls. The reasons are obvious: polling is almost always done by pro-Democrat media or academia-based organizations (in NJ, the Star Ledger and Quinnipiac are the polls most often cited), and they build a pro-Dem bias into their polling techniques. So you can generally subtract say about four points from a Democrat's margin in polls to get a true indicator of what is really going on.