Cygnal

§1About

✎ Drafted by AI from the public sources cited. Each sentence links to its source.

Cygnal describes itself as a political polling and analytics firm, established in 2007, that serves campaigns, caucuses, committees and causes and offers what it calls multi-mode polling.¹ A post on its website says the firm started in Montgomery, Alabama as a general-service political firm and by 2018 dropped its other services to focus on polling.² Its team page lists Brent Buchanan as founder and chief executive.³

Kind

Works for one party^2,4

Founded

2007^1,2

§2Who it works with

Why this matters: Owners, news partners and the firms behind a poll's interviews shape what gets asked, how, and what gets published.

Published with

Names its polls have been published under, alongside other pollsters or news outlets.

• Cygnal/Beacon Research: Beacon Research · 2 polls listed

Who paid for its polls

§3Whom it works for

Why this matters: A firm that also works for one party's campaigns can still publish accurate polls, but readers deserve to know.

Works for Republican candidates or groups. Cygnal's own website refers to it as a Republican pollster and the most accurate Republican polling firm of the 2020 cycle, and says it ran dozens of polls for Donald Trump's campaign and worked on races that moved the Alabama legislature from Democratic to Republican supermajorities; the pages read name no Democratic campaign or party clients.^2,4

• Donald Trump campaign. A post on Cygnal's website says the firm conducted dozens of polls for Donald Trump's campaign.²

Of its 62 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 1 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 11 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁷.

Federal campaigns and committees that paid it

From 2023 through 2026, 59 federal committees reported paying Cygnal $6,617,494 for polling, surveys or research^8,9,10,11. By the party each committee reports to the FEC: 0 Democratic, 45 Republican, 1 another party, and 13 none (most PACs and super PACs report none).

§4How its numbers compare with other polls

Why this matters: A firm whose polls run steadily to one side of everyone else's is worth reading alongside others.

Each of its polls since the 2024 election is compared with other pollsters' polls of the same question whose field period ended within 14 days, each other pollster counted once⁷. The figure is the average gap, with a 95% margin. This compares it with other polls, not with the truth: the others can be the ones that are off.

Party margin

R+0.4 (±0.5) across 28 polls of the generic ballot and 2026 races, in 7 contests.

Without a party-aligned sponsor

R+0.2 (±0.6) across 23 polls

When paid for by a Republican-aligned sponsor

R+0.9 (±1.2) across 5 polls

Net favorability: Donald Trump

+1.7 points (±1.1) across 15 polls, against other polls of the same question.

Net favorability: JD Vance

+1.7 points (±1.6) across 8 polls, against other polls of the same question.

D+ means its polls showed Democrats doing better than other polls did; R+, Republicans. A figure from fewer than 5 polls isn't shown.

§5Record against results

Why this matters: The one test that doesn't depend on other polls: how close a firm's final polls came to what voters did.

From FiveThirtyEight's final public data^12,13: general-election polls between a Democrat and a Republican in the last three weeks before each election, compared with the certified result. FiveThirtyEight rated each name polls were published under separately. Across all 8,957 such polls, the average miss was D+0.7, so the relative figure takes out the misses every pollster shared that year.

ABC News closed FiveThirtyEight in March 2025; its data stops at the 2022 elections. 2026 results will be added once states certify them.

§62026 record against the count

Why this matters: How close this pollster's last 2026 polls came to how people voted, measured the way FiveThirtyEight measured earlier elections.

One poll of one race between a Democrat and a Republican, with field periods ending in the 21 days before November 3, 2026, compared with each race's count. Some of those races are still being counted, so these figures use the unofficial count and will change until states certify.

Average miss

R+5.5

Relative to other polls of the same races

R+0.3

Typical size of miss

5.5 pts

Error is the poll's D−R margin minus the count's, as shares of all votes in the race; D+ means it showed Democrats doing better than they did. From fewer than 5 polls, so read it as a few data points, not a pattern.

§7Its polls

§8What we looked for and didn't find

• No standing news partners were found; Alabama Daily News and Gray Television appear as sponsors on its polls in our data, but no page describing a standing arrangement was read.
• American Principles Project, the Republican Attorneys General Association, Conservative Energy Network, Democracy Defense Project and Iowans for Tax Relief appear as poll sponsors in our data; none was confirmed as a standing client.
• No source was found explaining the Cygnal/Beacon Research byline on some of its polls.
• Its website does not name fieldwork, panel or sample vendors.
• Its website does not give a current headquarters; the Harper Polling release is datelined Washington, D.C.
• The dates of the Harper Polling release and of the Cygnal posts read are not shown on the pages; the 2025 end date for Harper rests on the Harper Polling site saying it relaunched as independent in spring 2025.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.