Quinnipiac University Poll

§1About

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

The Quinnipiac University Poll says it was founded in 1988, when its first Connecticut polls were run as a class project, and now polls nationally and in more than twenty states.^3,4 Its about page says it is fully funded by the university and is part of the university's Office of Marketing and Communications, and names Doug Schwartz as director and Mary Snow as assistant director.³ Its methodology page says live interviewers call landlines and cell phones from 200 telephone interviewing stations, using random digit dialing samples bought from Dynata.⁵

Kind

Academic³

Founded

1988³

§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.

Says it does no work for parties or candidates. Its website describes the poll's work as independent, non-partisan research; the pages read do not say in so many words whether it accepts work from candidates or parties.^3,4

Of its 44 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁶.

§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 once⁶. 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+2.4 (±3.2) across 6 polls of the generic ballot and 2026 races, in 3 contests.

Net approval: Donald Trump

−4.9 points (±1.6) across 18 polls, against other polls of the same question.

Net favorability: JD Vance

−1.6 points (±3.8) across 5 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^7,8: 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.

§6Its polls

§7What we looked for and didn't find

• No standing news partners were found; its about page lists many outlets that report its results but describes no formal partnership.
• No sponsors other than the university were found.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.