What Can a Poll Tell Us?

A lot of the polls we conduct are about elections and who people prefer. But there’s another way that we think about poll accuracy, and that is thinking about the themes of the election. Polls help us reflect back how people are feeling, not just the people around you, but the people you don’t hear from. My name is Ruth Igielnik, and I work on the Times-Siena poll. I do everything from working with our team to write the questionnaire. We field the survey and then ***yze the results afterwards. We ask voters how they feel about the economy, how they’re feeling about the political parties, how voters are feeling about immigration. In the last 25 years, many of our elections in swing states have come down to one-to-two percentage points, and a typical poll margin of error is about three percentage points. It’s very difficult for polls to be that precise when elections are that close. Heading into the 2026 midterms, we try to think of new ways to reach voters. We’ve experimented with reaching them over a text message and through the mail, and we conduct our polls over the phone, making sure that we have the representative sample that we need in order to be accurate.