J.L. Partners

§1About

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

J.L. Partners describes itself as a polling and research firm for political, corporate, financial and think-tank clients, founded by former pollsters for the British prime minister.¹ Its US website gives an office in Washington, D.C., names the legal entity as Johnson and Lubbock USA, LLC and calls it a US-based LLC with a domestic focus, while its British website gives an office in London.^1,2 Its senior team page names co-founders James Johnson, who it says was senior opinion research and strategy adviser to Prime Minister Theresa May, and Tom Lubbock, who it says ran analytics and polling at Conservative Campaign Headquarters from 2017 to 2019.³ Its website says it uses mixed-method polling, including in-app game polling, and its January 2025 release says that sample was collected online.^1,4

Kind

Commercial firm¹

§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.

Works for Republican candidates or groups. This rests on the clients it names: the only party or campaign client its US website names is the Ohio Republican Party, in a testimonial about 2022 Senate polling. The site does not otherwise say which parties it works for, and its founders' past roles with the British Conservative government are listed as career history rather than as clients.^1,3

• Ohio Republican Party (2022–now). The J.L. Partners homepage carries a testimonial from Bob Paduchik, a former Ohio Republican Party chair, saying the firm polled the 2022 US Senate race for the Ohio Republican Party.¹

Of its 43 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 1 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁵.

§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 once⁵. 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.

Net approval: Donald Trump

+6.8 points (±2.0) across 23 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^6,7: 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.

§6Documented findings

Why this matters: Only findings by a professional body, a court, a regulator, an aggregator's own published decision, or the pollster itself are listed, each cited to that decision.

• British Polling Council, September 2026. According to Research Live, the British Polling Council said in September 2026 that there had clearly been breaches of its Rule 2.1, which concerns disclosing who commissioned a published poll, in three British polls J.L. Partners conducted that Channel 4 News reported were commissioned by Reform UK. Research Live reported that the council was seeking more information from the member concerned, that the Market Research Society referred the matter to the Market Research Standards Board, and that J.L. Partners said IL Office LLC, which it understood to be the family office of a UK-based philanthropist, paid for the research and that it had no grounds for concern.^8,9

§7Its polls

§8What we looked for and didn't find

• No founding year was found on either J.L. Partners website.
• No ownership breakdown, or account of how the US LLC relates to the British firm beyond shared founders, was found.
• Its releases say samples were collected online but do not name a panel or fieldwork vendor.
• No start date or written agreement was found for the Daily Mail polling; Breaking Points and The Heritage Foundation each appear as the sponsor of a single poll on its site and are not recorded as standing relationships.
• The British Polling Council website refused requests (HTTP 425), so the council's own statement was not read and the finding rests on Research Live; no outcome of the council's or the Market Research Standards Board's review was found, and the matter concerns British polls rather than US polls.
• Beyond the finding recorded, searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.