New U.S. State Collection Available at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research

February 09, 2021

The Roper Center at Cornell University is proud to announce a new initiative to make questions from U.S. state-level polls available in the Roper iPoll database.  In response to the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s call for the polling community to invest more resources in studying and improving U.S. state polling, the Roper Center has created the U.S. State Collection to aid this research by making thousands of questions easily accessible and by including detailed methodological information, such as exact question wording, sample size, and survey method.

View a short video on the collection here in YouTube.

The new question database includes state polls from major national polling organizations and some of the oldest and most respected state-level polling series. The U.S. State Collection currently includes several thousand questions from polls of recent years and is growing daily as questions are added from both newly released state polls and Roper’s historical dataset collection. The historical dataset collection holds over 4,000 U.S. state polling datasets dating back to 1940, including Archibald Crossley’s seminal 1944 election polls, Joe Belden’s Texas Poll, Mervyn Field’s California Poll, the Iowa Poll, the Los Angeles Times Poll, and state exit polls back to 1978. The collection will ultimately contain more than 100,000 questions.

The new U.S. State Collection includes polls from both the Longstanding Methods Collection and the Recently Developed Methods Collection to better support essential research into survey methodology at the state level. A partial list of organizations to be represented in the State of the U.S. States Collection includes:

ABC NewsMinnesota Star Tribune
AP VotecastMonmouth University
CBS NewsNational Election Pool/Edison Research
CNNNPR
Eagleton (Rutgers)Quinnipiac University
Fairleigh Dickinson UniversitySiena College
GallupSuffolk University
Glengariff GroupStockton University
Harvard Opinion Research ProgramThe Upshot
Kaiser Family FoundationUniversity of Maryland
Marquette Law PollUSA Today
Marist CollegeVanderbilt University Poll
MassIncThe Wason Center
Middle Tennessee State UniversityWashington Post

Roper Center invites all polling organizations conducting polls at the state level to submit their data to the State Collection. Contact data-services@ropercenter.org.

Using the search homepage in Roper iPoll, users can select which states and/or the District of Columbia they would like to include in their search (be sure to click “Additional Search Filters”).

state data