The Times will aggregate public opinion surveys and produce new polling averages, starting with polls that ask about President Trump’s job performance. And we will make the data available to everyone.
The New York Times has begun a new effort to track public opinion surveys, starting by collecting all polls on President Trump’s job approval.
We’ll add more features in coming weeks, including charts showing how the average of the latest polls has changed over time. We also plan to track more types of polls, such as for this year’s governor’s races and next year’s congressional elections.
This project is part of The Times’s broader effort to bring context and clarity to this ubiquitous but difficult-to-understand part of our modern information age. Polls have had good years and bad years; most recently they had an OK year. The number of public polls has risen sharply in recent years, as it has become easier and cheaper to get started as a pollster. At the same time, a number of name-brand pollsters that were trusted for decades have closed.
The result is that it is hard to make sense of all the information we have, even for the most informed among us. We hope this project can help.
As one half of the Times/Siena College poll, which has been recognized as one of the country’s premier pollsters, we believe there’s value in an individual poll. But we also think aggregating polls and providing analysis of them collectively, as we did during last year’s election, is a service worth preserving — one that may be needed even more today with the profusion of polling, contradictory findings and loud partisan voices.