Pollster · Academic

Rutgers University Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling

Also published as Rutgers-Eagleton.

AAPOR Transparency Initiative since March 28, 2015¹Research draft

Polls since 2024: 2
Latest poll ended: October 17, 2025
Record vs. results, relative: D+1.0

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 Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, home of the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll, is a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick; its releases say it was established in 1971 and that its mission is to provide scientifically sound, nonpartisan information about public opinion.^2,3 Its about page names Ashley Koning as director, lists staff including Debra Borie-Holtz, Jessica Roman and David Martin, and says the center also does research for government and nonprofit organizations and for university researchers.³ Its 2025 releases say the poll is paid for and sponsored by the Eagleton Institute of Politics and that questionnaires and analysis are done in house; the August 2025 New Jersey governor poll was fielded by SSRS on a probability-based panel of New Jersey adults, and the October 2025 poll by Braun Research and Rumble Up through live calls and one-to-one text messages.^2,4

Kind: Academic³
Founded: 1971^3,5

§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.

Part of

Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University. Its releases say the center is a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.^2,3

News partners

The Star-Ledger (1983-09–2005). The poll's history page says it became the Star-Ledger/Eagleton Poll in September 1983 under an agreement for four polls a year and that the partnership ended in 2005.⁵

Fieldwork or panel by

SSRS. The August 2025 release says SSRS fielded the poll through the Rutgers-Eagleton/SSRS Garden State Panel, a probability-based panel of New Jersey adults recruited by address-based sampling.⁴
Braun Research. The October 2025 release says the poll was fielded by Braun Research and Rumble Up, with sample from L2 and Marketing Systems Group.²
Rumble Up. The October 2025 release names Rumble Up alongside Braun Research as fielding that poll, most of whose interviews came through one-to-one text messages leading to an online survey.²

Led by

Ashley Koning. The about page names Ashley Koning as director, and the October 2025 release calls her an assistant research professor and the center's director.^2,3

§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 about page states a mission of providing nonpartisan information about public opinion, and its releases say the poll is paid for by the Eagleton Institute of Politics, which they call a non-partisan academic center; no campaign or party clients are named. This rests on the firm's own description.^2,3

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 sponsor⁶.

§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^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.

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
Rutgers University Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling	17	2000–2021	D+1.0	D+1.0	6.7 pts	2.3 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 2 polls of its we list, newest first.
In the field	Question	Result	With	Paid for by	Sample
October 3–October 17, 2025	Governor · 2025 New Jersey	Mikie Sherrill 50 · Jack Ciattarelli 45			795 LV
July 31–August 11, 2025	Governor · 2025 New Jersey	Mikie Sherrill 47 · Jack Ciattarelli 37			1,650 LV

§6What we looked for and didn't find

No current standing news partner was found; the Star-Ledger partnership ended in 2005 according to the poll's history page.
The about page says it does research for government and nonprofit clients but names none.
Searches and AAPOR's statements page found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction or correction by the center; news reports of campaign criticism of its 2025 polls are not findings.