Trafalgar Group

§1About

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

The Trafalgar Group's about page describes a strategy and polling firm whose team, it says, has more than 50 years of combined experience and has worked on more than 200 campaigns, along with PAC, corporate public relations and debate strategy.¹ A speaker biography published by The Conference Board names Robert Cahaly as its founder and chief pollster and says the firm is based in Atlanta, Georgia.² Its methodology page says it reaches respondents by live callers, interactive voice response, text messages, email, a digital dial-back interface and online opt-in platforms, using questionnaires of nine questions or fewer, and its poll reports point readers to that page.^3,4

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.

Published with

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

• Trafalgar Group/InsiderAdvantage: InsiderAdvantage · 8 polls listed

§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. The Trafalgar Group's about page names no party, candidate or client, and the Conference Board biography says its clients include partisan organizations and political action committees without naming a party.^1,2

Of its 23 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 10 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁷.

Federal campaigns and committees that paid it

From 2023 through 2026, 2 federal committees reported paying Trafalgar Group $40,000 for polling, surveys or research^8,9,10,11. By the party each committee reports to the FEC: 0 Democratic, 1 Republican, and 1 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 once⁷. 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

+12.5 points (±2.9) across 9 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^12,13: 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.

§6Documented findings

Why this matters: Only findings by a professional body, a court, a regulator, an aggregator's own published decision, or the pollster itself are listed, each cited to that decision.

• Silver Bulletin, January 22, 2026. Silver Bulletin's polling-average methodology, dated January 22, 2026 and read on 2026-11-06, says it currently classifies Trafalgar Group polls as partisan, giving as its reason that the firm has a history of working with Republican campaigns on some of its surveys without fully disclosing those relationships. The page says polls classified as partisan are handled under different house-effect assumptions in its generic ballot average, and that its approval averages make no partisan distinction.¹⁴

§7Its polls

§8What we looked for and didn't find

• No founding year was found on a primary page; the site footer gives a 2016 copyright start, which is not a founding date.
• Its website names no leaders, so leadership and location rest on a Conference Board speaker biography.
• No ownership details were found beyond its founder.
• No standing news partner or non-news client was found; its recent releases on its own site name no sponsor.
• Its methodology page names no outside fieldwork or panel vendor.
• No named campaign or party clients were found.
• The recorded court ruling concerns Robert Cahaly's own 2010 calls and does not name the firm; a reviewer may decide whether it belongs on the firm's record.
• A Wikipedia article and talk page say Split Ticket and FiveThirtyEight left the firm out of their averages, but no statement by either was found (the 2022 Split Ticket analysis of its polls does not say so), so nothing is recorded.
• Findings search: web searches combining the name with AAPOR, aggregator exclusion, court, regulator and retraction terms found nothing that fits the finding rules, and AAPOR's statements page names none of this batch's firms.
• Court records were checked only through web searches; PACER and state court dockets were not searched.