U.S. State Collection

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 on 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:

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”).

 For further information on this collection please contact Data Services.

Also included in this collection are a large number of state-level surveys still in paper formats. Highlights include polls on anti-semitism in rural Iowa and Nebraska, gambling in Connecticut, and a 1993 study of racial views in North Carolina. Contact Data Services if you are interested in learning more about the surveys in the table below.