SurveyUSA

§1About

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

SurveyUSA describes itself as a boutique custom research firm offering public opinion polling and market research, and says it has done this work for more than 30 years.¹ Its team page lists Ken Alper as president and Sarah Leve as owner.² Northwestern University's Medill alumni magazine describes Jay Howard Leve, who died on December 5, 2022, as the founder and chief executive of Hypotenuse and SurveyUSA.³ The methodology note published with its 2026 KSTP polls says data are collected by telephone, online or both depending on the project, with landline sample bought from Aristotle of Washington, D.C.⁴

Kind

Commercial firm¹

§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.

Says it does no work for parties or candidates. The methodology note SurveyUSA publishes with its KSTP polls calls it an independent, non-partisan, apolitical research company that surveys for media, academic institutions, businesses, nonprofits, governments, agencies and elected officials.^4,6

Of its 28 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 1 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁷.

§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^8,9: 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.

§52026 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.

One poll of one race 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+8.4

Relative to other polls of the same races

R+2.2

Typical size of miss

8.4 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.

§6Its polls

§7What we looked for and didn't find

• No founding year was found on the pages read; its earlier website pages that gave a history now redirect to its homepage.
• No office location was found on its current website.
• No start date was found for the KSTP arrangement; other TV sponsors in our data (KGTV, KOB-TV, KAAL-TV) were not checked against their releases.
• Its homepage shows client logos, but the names are not given in text and are not recorded as relationships.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.