Pollster · Nonprofit

Public Policy Institute of California

AAPOR Transparency Initiative since December 23, 2014¹Research draft

Polls since 2024: 1
Latest poll ended: October 14, 2025
Record vs. results, relative: R+1.5

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.

The Public Policy Institute of California describes itself, in the boilerplate of its press releases, as a public charity dedicated to informing and improving public policy in California through independent, objective, nonpartisan research.² ProPublica's summary of its Form 990 for the year ending June 2025 lists it as a 501(c)(3) organization in San Francisco and names Tani Cantil-Sakauye as president and CEO.³ A May 2026 PPIC release names Mark Baldassare as its statewide survey director and holder of the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Public Policy, and says that survey interviewed 1,707 California adults from May 14 to 18, 2026.²

Kind: Nonprofit^2,3

§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.

Polls regularly for

Arjay R. and Frances F. Miller Foundation. A May 2026 PPIC release says its Californians and Their Government survey is supported with funding from the Arjay R. and Frances F. Miller Foundation.²

Fieldwork or panel by

Ipsos. An Ipsos brochure about its probability-based KnowledgePanel in California lists the PPIC Statewide Survey among its California work, at about 1,500 adults per wave.⁴

Led by

Tani Cantil-Sakauye. ProPublica's Form 990 summary for the year ending June 2025 names Tani Cantil-Sakauye as president and CEO.³
Mark Baldassare. A May 2026 PPIC release names Mark Baldassare as statewide survey director.²

Who paid for its polls

Sponsors named on its polls, most polls first⁵. A party-aligned flag is VoteHub's, per poll.
Sponsor	Polls	Between	Flagged party-aligned
Arjay R. and Frances F. Miller Foundation	1	October 14, 2025	No

§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.

Says it does no work for parties or candidates. Its own press release boilerplate says PPIC takes no position on ballot measures or legislation and does not endorse, support or oppose any political party or candidate for public office.²

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 sponsor⁵.

§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^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.

Error is the poll's D−R margin minus the result's; D+ means it showed Democrats doing better than they did.
Published as	Polls	Elections	Average miss	Relative to other polls	Typical size of miss	538's last rating
Public Policy Institute of California	12	2004–2022	R+3.9	R+1.5	4.3 pts	2.5 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 1 polls of its we list, newest first.
In the field	Question	Result	With	Paid for by	Sample
October 4–October 14, 2025	proposition 50 · 2025 California	Yes 56 · No 43		Arjay R. and Frances F. Miller Foundation	943 LV

§6What we looked for and didn't find

PPIC's own website (ppic.org) refused automated requests with HTTP 403, so its about page, survey methodology pages and the October 2025 sample release were not read; facts here come from a PPIC press release distributed through Public, ProPublica's Form 990 summary and an Ipsos brochure.
No founding year was found on a page that could be read; ProPublica's summary gives September 1994 as the date of its federal tax exemption, which is not recorded as a founding date.
The Ipsos brochure does not say since when Ipsos has fielded the survey, and the mode and vendor of the October 2025 sample survey were not confirmed.
No standing news partner, co-pollster or ownership relationship was found.
A findings search found no AAPOR statement, court ruling, regulator action or retraction concerning PPIC; aggregator statements were left to the separate sweep and not searched here.