Emerson College
Graded against the actual result across 241 races (from 377 polls, through 2025).
Head-to-head vs VotePredictor Elections
The fair, apples-to-apples test: on the 238 races Emerson College actually polled, how its final poll's margin compared to what VotePredictor Elections predicted for those same races.
| Model | Avg miss (pts) | Called right |
|---|---|---|
| Emerson College | 4.25 | 83% |
| VotePredictor Elections | 3.85 | 86% |
VotePredictor Elections 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 (238)
Each race Emerson College 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 | 75 | 3.68 | -0.56 | 76% |
| 1–3 wk | 168 | 4.27 | -0.79 | 80% |
| 3–6 wk | 82 | 5.37 | -0.33 | 74% |
| 6–9 wk | 52 | 5.24 | -0.90 | 75% |
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) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 4 | 1.9 | R+0.6 |
| 2014 | 8 | 10.3 | R+10.3 |
| 2016 | 83 | 5.0 | D+1.5 |
| 2017 | 9 | 6.5 | R+6.1 |
| 2018 | 84 | 5.2 | R+0.3 |
| 2020 | 48 | 4.3 | D+3.8 |
| 2021 | 5 | 3.3 | D+3.3 |
| 2022 | 82 | 3.9 | R+0.7 |
| 2024 | 51 | 2.8 | D+2.0 |
| 2025 | 3 | 7.8 | R+3.2 |
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.