Likely voters lean more Democratic for November's midterms, a change from past cycles

In every wave of our poll this year, screening for likely voters has nudged the congressional generic ballot a point or two bluer

Polls (/c/Polls) - OddsRabbit

This community is just for polls - polls on literally anything your heart desires! Ask all the multiple choice questions you can think of!

Do AI and bogus respondents threaten polling’s future?

Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation, answers some common questions about the current polling landscape in the U.S.

Why does every poll seem to show a tossup now?

Campaigns see internal polls as tools for fundraising

We polled Kansas. Democrats wanted to talk. Republicans, not so much.

The Post is publishing results of its Kansas Senate poll in the interest of transparency and to highlight the challenges the poll faced.

Election polling errors across time and space

Are election polling misses becoming more prevalent? Are they more likely in some contexts than others? Here we undertake an over-time and cross-national assessment of prediction errors in pre-election polls. Our analysis draws on more than 30,000 national polls from 351 general elections in 45 countries between 1942 and 2017. We proceed in the following way. First, building on previous studies, we show how errors in national polls evolve in a structured way over the election timeline. Second, we examine errors in polls in the final week of the election campaign to assess performance across election years. Third, we undertake a pooled analysis of polling errors—controlling for a number of institutional and party features—that enables us to test whether poll errors have increased or decreased over time. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the recent performance of polls has not been outside the ordinary. However, the performance of polls does vary across political contexts and in understandable ways.

FiftyPlusOne - Latest Political Polls and Averages

A comprehensive list of polls and polling averages for elections and politician approval.

FiftyPlusOne - Latest Political Polls and Averages

A comprehensive list of polls and polling averages for elections and politician approval.

The Twilight of the Polls? A Review of Trends in Polling Accuracy and the Causes of Polling Misses

Polls have had a number of high-profile misses in recent elections. We review the current polling environment, the performance of polls in a historical context, the mechanisms of polling error, and the causes of several recent misses in Britain and the US. Contrary to conventional wisdom, polling errors have been constant over time, although the level of error has always been substantially beyond that implied by stated margins of error. Generally, there is little evidence that voters lying about their vote intention (so-called ‘shy’ voters) is a substantial cause of polling error. Instead, polling errors have most commonly resulted from problems with representative samples and weighting, undecided voters breaking in one direction, and to a lesser extent late swings and turnout models. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for polling both in terms of fixing the problems identified and new approaches to understanding public opinion.

Opinion | This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling for Good

Instead of navigating the obstacles to conduct polls with human respondents, pollsters are running A.I. simulations instead. Why?

Preliminary ranked choice voting results in Alaska’s 2026 elections - FairVote

On November 3, Alaskans went to the polls in critical ranked choice voting elections for Congress, governor, and state legislature.

Democrats win control of House, Senate as voters spurn Trump

The electoral results amount to a sharp rebuke of President Donald Trump, who has seen his popularity plummet as voters reject his handling of the economy, military action against Iran and other issues.

Voter Studies | Australian Election Study

The AES routinely collects data among a nationally representative sample of voters and among major party candidates standing for election (the latter is the Australian Candidate Study – ACS). Both the voter and candidate instruments combine a common set of questions. More details on the general methodology used are detailed below, and specific information about the methods used for a particular year is available from the information page for that wave.

New York City cast vote record: An initial analysis of the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary - FairVote

This post explores the New York City cast vote record released July 24 – showing how voters used their rankings in the primary.

Why Are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls so Variable When Votes Are so Predictable?

As most political scientists know, the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months before the election. Thus, the general election campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people's opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their support for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast? In this exploratory study, we consider several intuitively appealing, but ultimately wrong, resolutions to this puzzle, and discuss our current understanding of what causes opinion polls to fluctuate and yet reach a predictable outcome. Our evidence is based on graphical presentation and analysis of over 67,000 individual-level responses from forty-nine commercial polls during the 1988 campaign and many other aggregate poll results from the 1952–1992 campaigns. We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, "rational." In contrast, voters decide which candidate to eventually support based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as well as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened preferences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of Presidential elections–-not due to misleading advertisements, sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates' positions on important issues. Winner of the Pi Sigma Alpha Awardfor the best paper at the previous year's meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association. Replication data at the Harvard Dataverse: [https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/I7GIKD](https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/I7GIKD).

How Popular Is A.I. With Voters? Not Very, a New Poll Finds.

As fears grow about the threat of artificial intelligence, neither party has claimed an advantage on the technology, a New York Times/Siena poll found. But voters are united in opposition to data centers.