Public Policy Polling
Graded against the actual result across 299 races (from 630 polls, through 2024).
Head-to-head vs VotePredictor Elections
The fair, apples-to-apples test: on the 297 races Public Policy Polling actually polled, how its final poll's margin compared to what VotePredictor Elections predicted for those same races.
| Model | Avg miss (pts) | Called right |
|---|---|---|
| Public Policy Polling | 4.65 | 81% |
| VotePredictor Elections | 3.87 | 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 (297)
Each race Public Policy Polling 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 | 172 | 4.00 | -0.24 | 86% |
| 1–3 wk | 152 | 4.23 | -0.83 | 70% |
| 3–6 wk | 182 | 4.81 | -0.89 | 81% |
| 6–9 wk | 124 | 4.84 | -1.30 | 82% |
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) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 82 | 3.7 | R+1.8 |
| 2009 | 9 | 6.2 | R+0.4 |
| 2010 | 93 | 5.2 | D+0.3 |
| 2011 | 9 | 5.3 | D+4.1 |
| 2012 | 203 | 3.5 | R+1.5 |
| 2013 | 7 | 7.5 | D+4.2 |
| 2014 | 83 | 5.3 | D+3.7 |
| 2016 | 52 | 4.6 | D+4.6 |
| 2018 | 23 | 3.8 | D+0.6 |
| 2020 | 50 | 6.5 | D+6.5 |
| 2022 | 11 | 3.2 | D+0.6 |
| 2024 | 5 | 3.0 | R+3.0 |
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.