Marist College
Graded against the actual result across 146 races (from 251 polls, through 2024).
Head-to-head vs VotePredictor Elections
The fair, apples-to-apples test: on the 139 races Marist 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Marist College | 4.42 | 76% |
| VotePredictor Elections | 3.06 | 87% |
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 (145)
Each race Marist 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 | 38 | 4.00 | -0.24 | 76% |
| 1–3 wk | 91 | 4.58 | -0.48 | 77% |
| 3–6 wk | 78 | 5.14 | -0.56 | 81% |
| 6–9 wk | 44 | 4.17 | -1.97 | 89% |
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) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1998 | 4 | 6.6 | R+6.6 |
| 2000 | 12 | 6.3 | R+5.8 |
| 2002 | 3 | 3.8 | R+3.8 |
| 2004 | 9 | 4.4 | D+1.8 |
| 2005 | 4 | 4.7 | R+4.7 |
| 2006 | 6 | 8.5 | R+1.7 |
| 2008 | 23 | 3.5 | R+1.7 |
| 2010 | 21 | 5.8 | R+5.6 |
| 2012 | 48 | 3.0 | R+1.2 |
| 2014 | 22 | 6.7 | D+5.6 |
| 2016 | 28 | 4.4 | D+2.9 |
| 2018 | 22 | 4.6 | D+2.5 |
| 2020 | 14 | 6.3 | D+6.2 |
| 2022 | 22 | 3.8 | D+2.6 |
| 2024 | 12 | 3.4 | D+3.3 |
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.