SurveyMonkey

§1About

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

SurveyMonkey describes itself as a global online surveys and forms company, and its 2018 release on closing its initial public offering says it was founded in 1999 and carries a San Mateo, California dateline.^2,3 A May 2023 release on its newsroom says an investor consortium led by Symphony Technology Group completed an all-cash acquisition of Momentive Global, valued at about $1.5 billion, and its leadership page names John Ouren as chief executive officer.^4,5 Its methodology page says its public research surveys draw a non-probability river sample from people taking other surveys on its platform, more than 1.5 million a day, and weight results to Census Bureau figures.⁶

Kind

Commercial firm^2,4

Founded

1999³

§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.

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.

Doesn’t say whom it works for. Its about, methodology and original research pages do not say whether it works for candidates or parties.^2,6,9

Of its 8 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor¹¹.

Federal campaigns and committees that paid it

From 2023 through 2026, 6 federal committees reported paying SurveyMonkey $4,827 for polling, surveys or research^12,13,14,15. By the party each committee reports to the FEC: 3 Democratic, 2 Republican, 1 another party, and 0 none (most PACs and super PACs report none).

§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 once¹¹. 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.

Net approval: Donald Trump

−5.1 points (±1.6) across 7 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^16,17: 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 start date was found for The 19th partnership; The 19th's own methodology article returned HTTP 402 and was not read.
• The NBC News Decision Desk Poll toplines on DocumentCloud returned HTTP 403, so their full methodology statements were not read, and no start date for the Decision Desk Poll series was found.
• No list of the members of the consortium led by Symphony Technology Group was retrieved.
• No campaign or party clients 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.