Ballotpedia's approach to covering polls
Updated May 2025
Polls are meant to survey a representative sample of a population and provide valuable insight into popular opinion. They can do so accurately or inaccurately. This page outlines Ballotpedia's approach to covering election polls.
We include poll reporting in our coverage of battleground races and ballot measures. We source these polls from polling company memos, news sources, and aggregator websites. We developed our inclusion guidelines based on the AP Stylebook.[1] To merit inclusion in our coverage, a poll must meet the following criteria:
- The poll discloses:
- the questions asked
- the results of the survey
- the method in which it was conducted
- the margin of error
- A poll that uses opt-in samples must weight its results
- The poll reports results in a timely manner.
Polls can also be used to influence opinion. They can be commissioned and released by candidates, campaigns, and satellite groups with a stake in the outcome. In order to provide readers with as much information as possible, we do report on internal polls that meet the criteria described above. For many primary elections, and elections in less populated areas, internal polls are the only polls available. Ballotpedia strives to identify internal polls as such, adding the name of the candidate who commissioned the survey to our tables and updates. We also include the names of other sponsors, such as satellite groups with a stake in the race.
Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight wrote, "Usually, the goal in leaking an internal poll is simple: make your candidate look good. In practice, that means that internal polls typically paint a rosier picture for the candidate conducting them than exists in reality."[2] If an internal poll shows the candidate who commissioned it performing worse than expected, the likelihood that the poll will be leaked or released may be impacted. Ballotpedia encourages readers to keep this in mind when viewing internal poll results.
Previous approaches
2022-2025
In 2022, we began relying primarily on aggregation from FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics for our list of polls for elections involving candidates (not ballot measures). We reported polls included in those sites' aggregation, where available. With the closure of FiveThirtyEight in 2025, we ceased relying solely on aggregation for polling.
2018-2021
For all elections that included poll coverage on Ballotpedia between 2018 and 2021, we did not use aggregation lists to determine the polls we covered and instead used the above approach outlined for races with no aggregation. We also excluded polls from our coverage that were conducted using primarily interactive voice response (IVR). We discontinued the latter policy in 2022.
Resources
To understand more about benefits and limitations of polling and how to interpret results, see these external resources:
- 2020 Pre-Election Polling: An Evaluation of the 2020 General Election Polls, American Association for Public Opinion Research, July 2021.
- How to Read Polls in 2020, FiveThirtyEight, June 15, 2020.
- A Field Guide to Polling: Election 2020 Edition, Pew Research Center, November 19, 2019.
- AP Style Guide: Polls and Surveys, Politico, accessed August 28, 2018.
- Polls Are Still As Accurate As They Were 75 Years Ago, Smithsonian Magazine, March 14, 2018.
- Maybe Election Polls Aren't Broken After All, Wired, March 12, 2018.
See also
Footnotes
