Keating Research

§1About

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

Keating Research, Inc. describes itself as a Colorado and Mountain West polling firm, founded in 2010, that does polling, message testing, focus groups and electorate modeling for candidates, ballot measures, foundations and institutions.¹ Its home page names Chris Keating, PhD, as president and founder, saying he has done survey research in Colorado since the 1990s, and Spencer Keating as vice president in charge of data and methods.¹ It says it samples from the voter file and uses hybrid phone and online, text-to-web and live phone surveys, and its public polling page lists its own public polls alongside memos its clients have released.^1,2 Its October 2026 poll of Arizona's 1st Congressional District is presented as a Keating Research public poll and names no outside sponsor.³

Kind

Commercial firm¹

Founded

2010¹

§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.

• Keating Research/OnSight Public Affairs/Melanson: OnSight Public Affairs, Melanson

§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 Democratic candidates or groups. Its home page lists candidate clients, among them John Hickenlooper, whom the same page's November 2026 poll lists as the Democratic Senate candidate, Congressman Joe Neguse, Adam Frisch for CO-03, Manny Rutinel for CO-08 and a 2026 Romero campaign, and names no Republican candidate or party committee; it also quotes The Colorado Sun calling it a Democratic pollster. This rests on the clients it names; the firm does not describe itself as working for one party.¹

• John Hickenlooper. Its home page lists Governor John Hickenlooper among its candidate clients, without years.¹
• Joe Neguse. Its home page lists Congressman Joe Neguse among its candidate clients, without years.¹
• Adam Frisch for CO-03. Its home page lists Adam Frisch for Colorado's 3rd District among its candidate clients.¹
• Romero campaign (CO-03) (2026–now). Its home page describes a July 2026 survey it did for the Romero campaign in Colorado's 3rd Congressional District.¹

Of its 1 poll listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁴.

Federal campaigns and committees that paid it

From 2023 through 2026, 8 federal committees reported paying Keating Research $610,933 for polling, surveys or research^5,6,7,8. By the party each committee reports to the FEC: 5 Democratic, 0 Republican, and 3 none (most PACs and super PACs report none).

§4Record 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^9,10: 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.

§52026 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+3.0

Relative to other polls of the same races

Even

Typical size of miss

3.0 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.

§6Its polls

§7What we looked for and didn't find

• The home page does not label most candidate clients by party or give years for them.
• No ownership details were found beyond Chris Keating's role as founder and president.
• No standing news partner is named; the home page quotes coverage in The Colorado Sun and Rocky Mountain PBS without describing a partnership.
• Our byline data include a joint Keating Research/OnSight Public Affairs/Melanson byline, but none of the pages read mention that partnership, so no co-pollster relationship is recorded.
• No outside fieldwork or panel vendor is named.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.