By Brent Buchanan, President & Founder
The polling business isn’t for the faint of heart…and I don’t even mean the public polls. That’s a fraction of what us private pollsters do.
Nate Silver, the godfather of ranking polling accuracy, just released his 2024 rankings over at the Silver Bulletin (and formerly through FiveThirtyEight). Overall, polling held up pretty well despite some banger misses, like the Iowa poll released days before the election.
Before we get to the results, let me rewind a bit. Cygnal has been in existence since 2007. We started in Montgomery, Alabama, as a do-it-all firm that would handle whatever a client or candidate needed. Our first client was a new state rep who paid us $500/mo to write – and he sure got his money’s worth in press releases, op-eds, and newsletters.
Fast forward a few years, and we had branched into running races, creating ads, producing direct mail, placing TV, and dabbling in polling. The 2010 cycle was a wakeup call for us when we handled 80% of the races that flipped the Alabama House & Senate from supermajority Democratic to supermajority Republican.
Even then we realized that polling was getting expensive, and those were the golden days of polling where you called nearly only landlines and about 10% of all voters would take your survey. However, we saw where things were headed. Landlines were going to die. Dialing cell phones was going to be the new mode of polling, and since those still have to be manually dialed, it was going to skyrocket the cost of a survey.
By 2018, we decided we were going to burn the ships, stop offering all other services, and go “all-in” on polling. That meant cancelling about $40,000/mo in retainers and closing down two successful business lines, so not an easy decision.
That election cycle – a tough one for Republicans and for polling in general – we released a dozen public surveys. The New York Times named us the most accurate pollster of the cycle, and Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight said we were the most accurate private pollster of the cycle. In 2018, we conducted a few hundred polls with an internal accuracy of 86% (what we rank as correct within the margin of error [MoE] or correct winner outside the MoE, which sometimes happens when you poll weeks out and a lot of spending occurs in a smaller race). This cycle, polling was 75% accurate.
In 2020, we conducted over 800 polls with an internal accuracy rating of 93%, including dozens of polls for Donald Trump’s campaign. Nate Silver ranked us again as the most accurate private pollster (in a cycle where polling was 79% accurate).
The 2022 cycle brought more growth, more polls – we crossed the 1000-polls-in-a-year metric with 95% accuracy – and another most accurate private pollster ranking from Nate Silver (in a cycle where polling was 72% accurate).
This last year, we also conducted more than 1,000 polls with 95% accuracy (in a cycle where polling was 70% accurate).
…and, drumroll, please…
Cygnal was named by Nate Silver as the most accurate private pollster AGAIN – four cycles running now!
I’m so grateful for our amazing team that has built the industry’s leading intelligence infrastructure to empower consistently accurate polls, even down to the crosstab level. We’re currently building what will be the next phase of continuous, optimized, impactful 360º data to take the industry beyond polling, as campaigns and causes need to a comprehensive approach to be more effective, accountable, and intelligent in the modern era.
I also want to thank our hundreds of clients who trust us to guide their message, targeting, spending, and adjustments. We are grateful to get to partner with you in the victories and learn with you in the losses.
Onward to 2026 (which our team would tell you it already feels like we’re neck-deep in)!
Read here: https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulletin