Emerson College Polling

§1About

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

Emerson College Polling conducts public opinion surveys from Boston, and its website calls it a nonpartisan organization.³ Its website says it began as a classroom exercise and that Spencer Kimball, an associate professor at Emerson College, established Emerson College Polling in 2012 and is its executive director.³

Kind

Academic³

Founded

2012³

§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.

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.

Says it does no work for parties or candidates. Its website says the polling center is a non-partisan organization; it does not say whether it accepts work from candidates or parties.³

Of its 126 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 1 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁶.

§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 once⁶. 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+0.8 (±1.2) across 32 polls of the generic ballot and 2026 races, in 15 contests.

Net approval: Donald Trump

+4.3 points (±0.9) across 18 polls, against other polls of the same question.

Net favorability: JD Vance

+5.6 points (±2.2) across 7 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^7,8: 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.

10 polls of 10 races 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+3.2

Relative to other polls of the same races

R+0.4

Typical size of miss

5.4 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 10 polls in all.

§7Its polls

§8What we looked for and didn't find

• No start or end dates were found for the arrangements with The Hill and Nexstar Media; a 2020 Emerson College news article about an earlier Nexstar partnership now redirects to a general news page.
• The Emerson College page describing the polling center could not be retrieved.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.
• The Silver Bulletin ratings table and the VoteHub methodology pages could not be read, so aggregator checks rest on published text from aggregators and news searches.