SEA Polling & Strategic Design: polls, partners and record

§1Whom 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.

Federal campaigns and committees that paid it

From 2023 through 2026, 4 federal committees reported paying SEA Polling & Strategic Design $148,714 for polling, surveys or research^1,2,3,4. By the party each committee reports to the FEC: 3 Democratic, 0 Republican, and 1 none (most PACs and super PACs report none).

The largest payers, by amount paid for polling, surveys or research. Only federal committees report to the FEC; state and local campaigns, work paid through another consultant, and polling billed as consulting are not here. Matched by the payee name on the filing: SEA POLLING & STRATEGIC DESIGN; SEA POLLING AND STRATEGIC DESIGN.
Committee	Kind	Party it reports	Paid for polling	Between
DARREN SOTO FOR CONGRESS	House campaign	Democratic	$59,400	June 3, 2024 – May 13, 2026
BACK THE BOLD	PAC	None reported	$45,164	July 30, 2026 – August 21, 2026
DCCC	Party committee	Democratic	$24,650	November 1, 2024 – June 26, 2026
FRIENDS OF LIZ DAHAN	House campaign	Democratic	$19,500	July 1, 2024 – July 15, 2024

§2Record 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^5,6: 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
SEA Polling & Strategic Design	10	2002–2018	D+2.2	Even	3.1 pts	1.6 of 3 · 0% partisan work

ABC News closed FiveThirtyEight in March 2025; its data stops at the 2022 elections. 2026 results will be added once states certify them.