The Harris Poll

§1About

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

Stagwell describes The Harris Poll as a public opinion and advisory firm that is part of Stagwell and says it has tracked public opinion since 1963; its brand page lists corporate reputation, brand strategy and public relations research as its focus areas.^2,3 With HarrisX, another Stagwell company, it conducts the monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll of more than 2,000 registered voters, which the poll's site says is released by Harvard's Center for American Political Studies.^4,5 The September 2026 release names Mark Penn as chairman of The Harris Poll, and a July 2024 Stagwell release named John Gerzema and Will Johnson as its co-chief executives.^2,5

Kind

Commercial firm^2,3

Founded

1963³

§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.

• HarrisX/Harris Poll: HarrisX · 83 polls listed
• HarrisX/Harris: HarrisX · 36 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.

Doesn’t say whom it works for. The Stagwell pages and the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll pages read do not say whether The Harris Poll works for candidates or parties; its own website could not be read.^3,4

Of its 90 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁷.

§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+4.4 (±1.5) across 9 polls of the generic ballot and 2026 races, in 1 contest.

Net approval: Congress

+11.7 points (±4.0) across 18 polls, against other polls of the same question.

Net favorability: JD Vance

+6.6 points (±1.4) across 18 polls, against other polls of the same question.

Net approval: Donald Trump

+8.3 points (±1.6) across 17 polls, against other polls of the same question.

Net favorability: Donald Trump

+6.7 points (±1.2) across 14 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^8,9: 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.

§6Its polls

§7What we looked for and didn't find

• The Harris Poll's own website (theharrispoll.com) and Axios returned HTTP 403, so its about, leadership and partner pages were not read; current leadership is as of the July 2024 Stagwell release and the September 2026 poll release.
• The Axios Harris Poll 100 reputation ranking, which search results describe as an Axios partnership since 2019, could not be confirmed from a page that loaded (see pointers).
• A Guardian/Harris Poll series appeared in search results only; no Guardian page was read, so no standing relationship is listed.
• Forbes appears as a sponsor on some of its polls in our data, but no standing Forbes relationship with The Harris Poll was found; a HarrisX page mentions Forbes only as hosting an interview with the HarrisX chief executive.
• No current confirmation was found that The Hill still releases the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll; the only source read is from 2017.
• The September 2026 release says respondents come from several opt-in web panels but does not name them, so no panel vendors are listed.
• No year was found for when Stagwell acquired The Harris Poll from a source that loaded.
• Lawsuits filed by its predecessor Harris Interactive in 2000 and 2001 over blocked panel e-mail were seen only in news search results and are left as pointers.
• Beyond those pointers, searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.