Marist Poll

§1About

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

The Marist Institute for Public Opinion, home of the Marist Poll, describes itself as a survey research center at Marist University in Poughkeepsie, New York, founded in 1978.² Its about page lists Lee M. Miringoff as director of the institute and Barbara L. Carvalho as director of the Marist Poll, and says hundreds of undergraduate students work in its survey center each semester.² Carvalho's biography on that page says the poll's partners have included NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, the McClatchy News Service, NPR and PBS News.² Marist announced that Marist College would become Marist University effective January 29, 2025, and the poll's pages use both names.^2,3 Its methods page says it conducts its own live telephone interviews from its campus survey center and also runs a design that combines phone, text and online interviews.⁴

Kind

Academic²

Founded

1978²

§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.

Doesn’t say whom it works for. The Marist Poll about and methods pages do not say whether it works for candidates or parties; the about page says only that it takes on research projects for individuals and organizations.^2,4

Of its 40 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

D+1.6 (±2.3) across 17 polls of the generic ballot and 2026 races, in 9 contests.

Net approval: Donald Trump

−3.9 points (±0.5) across 21 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.

§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.

2 polls of 2 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+0.9

Relative to other polls of the same races

D+1.7

Typical size of miss

0.9 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 start date was found for the NPR and PBS News partnership; the earliest joint release read is from January 2018.
• Its about page names NBC News, The Wall Street Journal and the McClatchy News Service among partners without dates, so they are not recorded as current relationships.
• No statement on the poll's funding was found.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the poll.