Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research
Graded against the actual result across 63 races (from 117 polls, through 2025).
Head-to-head vs the VotePredictor model
The fair, apples-to-apples test: on the 61 races Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research actually polled, how its final poll's margin compared to what the VotePredictor model predicted for those same races.
| Model | Avg miss (pts) | Called right |
|---|---|---|
| Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research | 4.33 | 74% |
| VotePredictor | 3.57 | 85% |
VotePredictor aggregates all the pollsters, so it's expected to beat any single one on margin — that's the value of averaging. The honest comparison among forecasters is on the combined board.
Every race (61)
Each race Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research polled, scored on its final poll — the call right before the vote — against the actual Dem−Rep result. Click a race for its full detail.
Accuracy by time to election
Lower is better. Time to election runs right (election week) to left (~2 months out).
By the numbers
| Time to election | Polls | Avg miss | vs field | Called right |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ≤1 wk | 11 | 6.31 | +2.03 | 73% |
| 1–3 wk | 34 | 3.53 | -1.54 | 71% |
| 3–6 wk | 32 | 5.01 | -0.73 | 75% |
| 6–9 wk | 40 | 3.88 | -2.27 | 78% |
vs field is this pollster's average miss minus all pollsters' at the same lead time — green beats the field, redtrails it. Our historical polls reach ~2 months out; earlier polling isn't in the record.
Track record by cycle — getting better?
| Year | Polls | Avg miss | Lean (house effect) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 13 | 2.8 | R+0.4 |
| 2014 | 20 | 7.1 | D+5.4 |
| 2016 | 15 | 2.9 | D+0.1 |
| 2017 | 7 | 3.1 | R+0.8 |
| 2018 | 24 | 4.8 | D+3.8 |
| 2020 | 11 | 6.0 | D+6.0 |
| 2021 | 3 | 6.3 | D+2.3 |
| 2022 | 16 | 2.0 | R+0.9 |
| 2024 | 6 | 2.1 | D+2.1 |
Do we credit a pollster for fixing its bias? Each cycle, the model re-estimates every pollster's lean from all its earlier polls (walk-forward) and subtracts it before using the poll. We tested weighting recent cycles more — it doesn't help: a pollster's lean in one cycle barely predicts the next (correlation 0.28), so the swings above are mostly noise, and averaging over more history beats chasing the latest cycle. The all-time estimate we use came out within ~0.5% of the best option.