Monmouth University Polling Institute

§1About

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

The Monmouth University Polling Institute was a polling unit of Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey; its December 2024 national release says the institute sponsored and conducted that Monmouth University Poll and was responsible for all aspects of survey design, weighting and analysis.² Monmouth University's president wrote on March 12, 2025 that the university would close the institute effective July 1, 2025, saying its public polling mission was no longer aligned with the university's strategic goals and that polling had become harder and more expensive, and the institute's page says it ceased operations on July 1, 2025.^3,4 The president's letter names Patrick Murray as the institute's founding director since its start in 2005.³

Kind

Academic^2,3

Founded

2005³

§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.

§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 December 2024 release calls it the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute and says it sponsored its own poll, but the pages read do not say whether it worked for candidates or parties or name any campaign or party clients.^2,4

Of its 2 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁷.

§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^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.

§5Its polls

§6What we looked for and didn't find

• The institute's site no longer carries an about page, so its own description of its mission and any statement on partisan work were not read.
• No end date for the Washington Post arrangement was found on a primary page; news search results describe a further joint South Carolina poll in early 2024.
• Earlier news partnerships, such as with Gannett New Jersey, were seen only in search results and opinion pieces and were not confirmed on a primary page.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction or correction; Patrick Murray's 2019 statement calling one national poll an outlier and his 2021 column on the New Jersey governor's race did not withdraw or revise those polls and are listed under pointers.