Pollster · Academic

Montana State University Billings

Research draft
Polls since 2024
3
Latest poll ended
October 21, 2026
Record vs. results, relative
D+2.1

Polls from the VoteHub polling API, used under CC BY 4.0. Each result links to the pollster's or sponsor's own release. Imported once a day; a poll VoteHub later changes keeps its earlier version on record here.

§1About

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

Montana State University Billings runs the Mountain States Poll, which its October 2026 report calls the 39th edition and says will now be named the Mountain State Poll because its responses come only from Montana.2 The report names Hope Dewell Gentry as director and says students in a political science course on media, public opinion and polling write the questions and conduct the phone interviews.2 It says the poll began in 1989 as the Eastern Montana College Poll, started by Craig Wilson, and that the 2026 edition was funded by the university's provost's office, its College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and its Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies.2 The 2026 edition collected 720 responses from October 5 to 21, weighted to Montana census data.2

Kind
Academic2
Founded
19892

§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.

Fieldwork or panel by

  • Scientific Telephone Samples. The October 2026 report says the random-digit-dial phone numbers came from Scientific Telephone Samples; 129 of its 720 responses were by phone.2
  • Centiment. The October 2026 report says online responses were collected by quota sampling through Centiment; 591 of its 720 responses came online.2

Founded by

  • Craig Wilson (1989). The October 2026 report says Craig Wilson started the poll in 1989 as the Eastern Montana College Poll.2

Led by

  • Hope Dewell Gentry. The October 2026 report names Hope Dewell Gentry as the poll's director.2

§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 October 2026 report does not say whether the poll works for candidates or parties, and the only funders it lists are units of the university.2

Of its 3 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor3.

§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 data4,5: 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.

Error is the poll's D−R margin minus the result's; D+ means it showed Democrats doing better than they did.
Published asPollsElectionsAverage missRelative to other pollsTypical size of miss538's last rating
Montana State University Billings112000–2020D+6.5D+2.16.9 pts1.5 of 3

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

The 3 polls of its we list, newest first.
In the fieldQuestionResultWithPaid for bySample
October 5–October 21, 2026U.S. Senate · 2026 MontanaKurt Alme 30 · Alani Bankhead 26 · Seth Bodnar 21 · Kyle Austin 3720 A
October 5–October 21, 2026U.S. House · 2026 MT-01Sam Forstag 49 · Aaron Flint 32 · Nick Sheedy 4287 A
October 5–October 21, 2026U.S. House · 2026 MT-02Troy Downing 29 · Brian Miller 18 · Patrick McCracken 15 · Michael Eisenhauer 2350 A

§6What we looked for and didn't find

  • The university's polling web page returned a 403 error, so the poll's history and past editions were read only through the 2026 report.
  • No standing news partner was found; news outlets report the poll, but no source read describes an arrangement with one.
  • No unit narrower than the university was confirmed as the poll's home, beyond the funders named in the 2026 report.
  • Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.
  • The Silver Bulletin ratings table and the VoteHub methodology pages were not read, so aggregator checks rest on searches of published text.