At Genesis Brand, we strive to accumulate and analyze polling data in a way that is honest, informed, comprehensive and accurate. While we do occasionally commission polls, most of our understanding of American public opinion comes from aggregating polling data conducted by other firms and organizations. This data forms the foundation of our polling averages, election forecasts and much of our political coverage.
In building our polling database, we aim to be as inclusive as possible. This means we will collect any poll that has been made publicly available and that meets a few basic standards:
- The poll must include the name of the pollster, survey dates, sample sizes and details about the population sampled. If these are not included in the poll’s release, we must be able to obtain them in order to include the poll.
- Pollsters must also be able to answer basic questions about their methodology, including but not limited to the medium through which their polling was conducted (e.g., landline calls, text, etc.), the source of their voter files and their weighting criteria.
However, there are some types of polls we don’t include, such as:
- “Nonscientific” polls that don’t attempt to survey a representative sample of the population or electorate.
- Polls like Civiqs or Microsoft News tracking polls that are produced using MRP (short for “multilevel regression with poststratification”), a modeling technique that produces estimates based on survey interviews that are then used to calculate probabilities; these probabilities are then projected onto the composition of the population in question. While this is a valid technique for understanding public opinion data, we exclude them because we consider them more like models than individual polls. (As an analogy, we think of this as using someone else’s barbecue sauce as an ingredient in your own barbecue sauce.)
An additional list of edge cases in which we may exclude polls can be found in this article. For instance, we exclude polls that ask voters who they support only after revealing leading information about the candidates.
We do include internal polls that are publicly available, except in one unusual circumstance (a general election poll sponsored by a candidate’s rival in the primary). Internal and partisan polls have an ast