Siena Research Institute

§1About

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

The Siena Research Institute (SRI), formerly the Siena College Research Institute, says it was founded in 1980 at Siena University in New York's Capital District and conducts regional, statewide and national surveys.^2,3 Its January 2026 announcement names Don Levy as director and says SRI began a polling partnership with The New York Times in 2013.² From January 2026 SRI entered what it and ReconMR, a Texas research firm, call a strategic integration, with ReconMR handling large-scale data collection and analytics; Siena University's president wrote that the work would continue under the SRI name with a powered by ReconMR designation and with its team kept on campus.^2,4,5

Kind

Academic^2,3

Founded

1980²

§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.

Published with

Names its polls have been published under, alongside other pollsters or news outlets.

• The New York Times/Siena University: The New York Times · 42 polls listed
• The New York Times/Siena College: The New York Times · 11 polls listed
• ReconMR/Siena University: ReconMR · 8 polls listed

Who paid for its polls

§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 Policy of Non-partisanship calls SRI a non-partisan organization that does not support or oppose candidates or take a stand for or against a political party.³

Of its 69 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁸.

§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 once⁸. 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+1.3 (±1.5) across 41 polls of the generic ballot and 2026 races, in 18 contests.

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^9,10: 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.

§62026 record against the count

Why this matters: How close this pollster's last 2026 polls came to how people voted, measured the way FiveThirtyEight measured earlier elections.

4 polls of 4 races between a Democrat and a Republican, with field periods ending in the 21 days before November 3, 2026, compared with each race's count. Some of those races are still being counted, so these figures use the unofficial count and will change until states certify.

Average miss

R+3.2

Relative to other polls of the same races

D+2.7

Typical size of miss

3.3 pts

Error is the poll's D−R margin minus the count's, as shares of all votes in the race; D+ means it showed Democrats doing better than they did. From fewer than 5 polls, so read it as a few data points, not a pattern.

§7Its polls

§8What we looked for and didn't find

• Sources disagree on when the New York Times partnership began: SRI's 2026 announcement says 2013, while a 2023 Siena University article quotes a staff member saying early 2012.
• Neither SRI nor ReconMR says who owns what after the January 2026 integration.
• The October 2026 ReconMR Texas Poll release read does not mention Siena, so the ReconMR/Siena University byline on Texas polls was not traced to a statement of each party's role.
• Albany Times Union, WAMC-FM, WPTZ, the Maine Trust for Local News, the Portland Press Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Texas A&M Bush School appear as sponsors on its polls in our data; no page describing a standing arrangement with any of them was read.
• No start date was found for the Newsday partnership.
• No call centers or panel vendors used for NYT/Siena polls were confirmed from a primary page.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.