For a good analysis of political polling in 2025, check out “Polling Accuracy in the 2025 Elections: Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City” by Spencer Lieb, Leo Johnson and Celeste Wetmore at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Here’s a stub of the article with a link:
Dear Readers: With the results in November’s major elections in New Jersey, New York City, and Virginia now final and certified, we are taking a look back at how pre-election polls did in forecasting these races. Democrats ended up being underestimated in both New Jersey and Virginia, while Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s (D) winning margin over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was smaller than polls suggested, likely because of the consolidation of the non-Mamdani vote right before the election. Today’s story was researched and written by our three stalwart fall 2025 student interns at the Crystal Ball, with guidance and input from us: Celeste Wetmore analyzed Virginia, Spencer Lieb analyzed New Jersey, and Leo Johnson analyzed New York City. They also previewed the Virginia House of Delegates elections right before last month’s election. See the note at the end of this story for information on which polls we included and other details. We included polls fully conducted in the last two weeks leading up to Election Day, although we expanded our look at the polls in the Virginia attorney general’s election to try to gauge how Attorney General-elect Jay Jones’s (D) texting scandal impacted the polls (and his performance). Links to all of the polls used in the analysis are at the end of the article. We also used analysis from the Voter Poll by SSRS, the exit poll conducted for major news networks. -The Editors
— In Virginia, Democrats were underestimated in all three statewide races, and polling conducted prior to Attorney General-elect Jay Jones’s (D) violent text message scandal better reflected the actual margin than polls conducted after.
— In New Jersey, Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill (D) eclipsed Jack Ciattarelli (R) and outperformed the average of final polls by double-digits. An underestimation of the Democratic edge in minority communities contributed to polls showing a race that was much closer than it ended up being.
— Three-way polls of the New York City mayoral election overstated Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s (D) eventual winning margin while two-way polls understated it. The two-way polls did capture the eventual growth in Andrew Cuomo’s voteshare as Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa collapsed at the end of the campaign.
Polling in the 2025 Virginia elections
Virginia saw a Democratic wave in all three of its executive elections, with the Democratic candidates’ margin exceeding pre-election polling averages by several points in each race.
Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger (D) maintained a clear lead throughout the gubernatorial race, yet she still surpassed most pollster expectations on Election Day with a 15.4-point margin over outgoing Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R).
Lt. Gov.-elect Ghazala Hashmi (D) similarly eclipsed her Republican opponent, John Reid, by an 11.6-point margin, outperforming the polls by a margin similar to that of Spanberger.
The scandal-driven upheaval in attorney general polling in the weeks leading up to the election made that race seem like it was neck and neck, but in the end, Attorney General-elect Jay Jones (D) defeated now-outgoing Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) by 6.6 percentage points. Interestingly, pollsters were closer to this race’s eventual margin prior to the revelation of Jones’s violent text messages than after. As it was, the final polls over the last two weeks of the election ended up understating Jones’s eventual margin by slightly more than the other two races, perhaps suggesting something of a social desirability bias in which some poll respondents did not want to admit they were voting for Jones but ultimately did.
Let’s go through the polling data for these three races. For the first two, governor and lieutenant governor, we’ll just look at polls conducted in the two weeks before the election. For the attorney general’s race, we’ll take a more expansive view, looking at all the polling from late September through the end of the race to evaluate how the race evolved in polling both before and after the emergence of the Jones texts.
