Many people have asked: "Which polls do you use?" To be as transparent as possible, all the raw polling data used is available for viewing and downloading as described below.
A different, but relevant question is: "Do you use every poll by every pollster?" The answer is no. By far, the vast majority of pollsters are consultants who are hired by candidates and parties to help them win elections. Many of them are quite good at keeping their eye on the ball—winning. To them, being honest is a tool to be used selectively, when it helps their overall goal. In general, these companies will release numbers when they make their candidate look good but if the numbers don't look good, they won't say anything. In some cases, they have been known to fudge the numbers or even make them up out of thin air. Furthermore, almost none of them publish their questions, methodology, or crosstabs making independent analysis impossible, whereas legitimate pollsters frequently publish this information (sometimes only to subscribers though). None of their polls are used on this site. Only polls from neutral pollsters, who are generally hired by the media or organizations not working for specific candidates, are used.
Viewing the Polling Data
If you just want to view nicely formatted and color-coded polling data (rather than downloading it for use in Excel or Open Office), click on one of these links.
Downloading the Polling Data
The raw (unformatted) polling data is available for the presidential and Senate races here. Depending on your browser settings, these files may be automatically downloaded when you click on them.
- Presidential polls as flat ASCII text
- Presidential polls in .csv format
- Senate polls as flat ASCII text
- Senate polls in .csv format
Every poll occupies one line.
The flat ASCII text fields are:
State Dem-% GOP-% Ind-% Starting-month Starting-day Ending-month Ending-day Pollster
The .csv files are formatted with the following comma-separated fields:
Day, Poll-length, State, (empty), Dem-%, GOP-%, Ind-%, Ending-date, (7 empty fields), Pollster-poll-length
The Day field is the day of the year at the midpoint of the poll, so a poll from Feb 02 to Feb 04 would have Feb 03 as the midpoint and this is day 34.
Polling Data in Graphical Form
If you prefer your data in graphical form, here it is.