Zogby Analytics
Graded against the actual result across 192 races (from 611 polls, through 2025).
Head-to-head vs VotePredictor Elections
The fair, apples-to-apples test: on the 130 races Zogby Analytics actually polled, how its final poll's margin compared to what VotePredictor Elections predicted for those same races.
| Model | Avg miss (pts) | Called right |
|---|---|---|
| Zogby Analytics | 5.98 | 79% |
| VotePredictor Elections | 3.28 | 90% |
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 (191)
Each race Zogby Analytics 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 | 160 | 4.18 | -0.06 | 71% |
| 1–3 wk | 227 | 5.84 | +0.78 | 76% |
| 3–6 wk | 150 | 6.09 | +0.39 | 74% |
| 6–9 wk | 74 | 7.02 | +0.88 | 72% |
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 | 22 | 8.7 | R+7.0 |
| 2000 | 110 | 4.5 | R+1.8 |
| 2002 | 60 | 5.3 | D+1.8 |
| 2004 | 138 | 4.5 | D+2.9 |
| 2006 | 152 | 7.5 | R+3.4 |
| 2008 | 75 | 5.8 | R+4.5 |
| 2010 | 10 | 5.6 | D+5.0 |
| 2012 | 32 | 3.5 | R+1.2 |
| 2013 | 4 | 6.4 | D+6.4 |
| 2014 | 3 | 5.8 | D+4.5 |
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.