University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab

§1About

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

The Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan, full-service survey research facility that opened in 2001, and its website places it as a center in UNF's College of Arts and Sciences.^2,3 Its March 2026 statewide release names Sean Freeder, a professor of political science, as director, while its October 2025 release named Michael Binder as faculty director.^2,4 The March 2026 release says live interviewers called respondents from the lab's own 40-station telephone facility while others were texted a link to a web survey, and that the poll was self-funded except for one question sponsored by Recall Florida.² The October 2025 release says questions on the attorney general and Senate races were sponsored by Florida Watch and a question on medical aid in dying by Florida End-of-Life Options.⁴

Kind

Academic²

Founded

2001²

§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. Its March 2026 release describes the lab as independent and nonpartisan and says the lab alone is responsible for survey design, data collection, analysis and reporting even when outside groups pay to add a question.²

Of its 11 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 2 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁵.

§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^6,7: 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.

2 polls of 2 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+0.9

Relative to other polls of the same races

D+2.3

Typical size of miss

0.9 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 standing news partner was found; its website mentions one statewide property insurance poll co-sponsored by the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel.
• Its website links a project quote request form but names no contract clients.
• No ownership beyond the university was found.
• The file name of its fall 2025 release includes the word revised, but no note explaining a revision was found in it.
• A 2020 Historic City News report says the lab re-fielded part of a St. Johns County poll after an error in the questionnaire; no statement by the lab was found, so it is not recorded as a retraction.
• Searches for AAPOR statements, court cases, regulator actions and aggregator exclusion statements found nothing naming the lab; a 2025 memo from a campaign pollster disputing one of its polls is commentary and is not recorded.