The New York Times Launches New Opinion Poll Tracking Project

The New York Times is launching a new project to track public opinion polls, beginning with data collection on President Trump's job approval ratings. In the coming weeks, new features will be added, including graphs reflecting changes in average scores based on recent polls. The project also plans to track more types of polls, such as those regarding gubernatorial elections this year and congressional elections next year.

This project is part of a larger initiative to bring clarity to this common, but difficult-to-understand, part of the modern information age. Polls have experienced both successful and unsuccessful years; quite recently, the year has been quite acceptable. The number of public polls has sharply increased in recent years, as it has become easier and cheaper to become a sociologist. At the same time, a number of well-known sociological firms, trusted for decades, have closed.

As a result, it is difficult to sort through all the available information, even for the most informed among us. We hope that this project will help.

As one component of the Times/Siena College poll, which has been recognized as one of the leading pollsters in the country, we believe that individual polls represent value. But we also believe that aggregating polls and providing analysis on them collectively, as we did during last year's elections, is a service that is worth preserving – perhaps even more so today, given the abundance of polls, conflicting results, and loud partisan voices.