Complete List of House Polls Used

Below we have a list of all the House polls used on this site. Only nonpartisan polls are used; polls taken by pollsters working for one of the parties are intentionally omitted. Unfortunately, this leaves very few polls left, but here is an example of why such a draconian approach is needed. Consider two polls taken in OH-16 in which incumbent Bob Ney (R) was being challenged by Zack Space (D). (Ney has subsequently dropped out due to allegations of corruption, but that is irrelevant here)

In poll 1, Space leads by 11%. In poll 2 he trails by 4%. The polls were taken at virtually the same time. What's up? The first poll was taken by a firm that works to elect Democrats; the second poll was taken by a firm that works to elect Republicans. We can safely label these, and many others taken by partisan firms as fantasy polls. They are intended to convince the public that their horse is ahead to encourage their side and demoralize the other one.

The date given below in olumn 2 is when the poll ended. The poll length is also given. The polls for each state are sorted in descending order of their midpoints.

The data are also available as plain text and in .csv format for use with Excel. In the latter, the first column is the day number of the midpoint (Jan. 1, 2006 = day 1.0) and the second is the poll length in days.

The site also has a page describing the House races, including brief descriptions of the situation, the names and photos of the candidates, and links to their campaign pages, Wikipedia entries, and state parties.