How the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling Explains the Role and Reliability of Polls

The Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling (ECPIP) at Rutgers University explains polls as a source of data rather than anecdotes, and treats their reliability as something that depends on how results are interpreted and used—not on polls alone. Its public commentary, press releases, and news announcements frame polls as essential evidence for understanding elections and public opinion, while cautioning against overreacting to individual results or substituting punditry for data. The center also points to methodological choices, such as its probability-based, multi-mode Garden State Panel, as part of how it approaches data quality.

The Core Argument: Data First, Anecdotes Second

The clearest statement of the center's view comes from ECPIP Director Ashley Koning, quoted in a news item on the site about the 2022 midterms and the anticipated "red wave" that did not materialize:

"The whole reason we have polls is to have data instead of anecdotes. We're all so traumatized by past problems with polls that I think people were maybe too distrustful of them and put too much stock in anecdotes, which we do need to explain what happened in elections. But you really have to put the data first."

This passage captures the center's position on three points:

• Purpose of polling: Polls exist to replace impressionistic storytelling with measurable data.
• Source of distrust: Past polling problems have made the public and media overly skeptical, sometimes to the point of preferring anecdotes.
• Prescription: Anecdotes have a role in explaining elections, but data should take priority in interpretation.

The framing also implicitly assigns responsibility for misreading elections to commentators rather than to polls themselves—the news item's headline states that pundits, not polls, should be blamed for the "red wave" that never happened.

How the Center Describes Its Own Role

The site describes ECPIP as conducting research "for all levels of government and nonprofit organizations with a public interest mission, as well as college and university-based researchers and staff." This positions the center as a public-interest research operation rather than a partisan or commercial polling outfit, which is relevant to how it presents the credibility of its work.

The site organizes its public-facing material into several areas:

For readers assessing reliability, the Poll Data Archive is the most directly useful entry point: it allows results to be examined beyond headlines and press summaries.

Reliability in Practice: Examples from the Site

The site's news and announcements illustrate how the center talks about polls in applied contexts.

Election polling

A Twitter post cited on the site reports New Jersey 2025 gubernatorial election results from a Rutgers-Eagleton Poll conducted July 31–August 11: Mikie Sherrill at 47%, Jack Ciattarelli at 37%, with 3% choosing neither/someone else and 12% undecided. The post also breaks results down by gender. The accompanying PDF link is the kind of primary document that lets readers check question wording, sample, and margins—details that matter when judging whether a single poll supports a broader narrative.

Health polling

A "Health Matters" poll conducted in 2017 in partnership with the Quality Institute found that just two in ten people had experience with telehealth, while many were willing to use technology as a new way to access health care. A later Health Matters poll found that New Jerseyans turn to and trust physicians and nurses most for health-related information—nine in ten report being likely to ask a doctor for information, eight in ten say they ask a nurse, and around nine in ten trust each of these sources to provide accurate health information.

These examples show the center's reliability claims operating at the level of specific, documented findings rather than general assertions: each result is tied to a named poll, a partner organization, and a published release.

What the Site Does and Does Not Say About Reliability

It is worth being precise about the boundaries of what the site supports:

• Supported: The center's director argues for prioritizing data over anecdotes; the site publishes poll releases, archives, and news commentary; it describes its panel as probability-based and multi-mode.
• Not stated on the site: Specific margin-of-error figures, response rates, or a formal reliability statement are not included in the available page content. Readers who need those details should consult the individual poll PDFs and the data archive rather than the homepage.
• No pricing or access terms for client services or the archive appear in the available material, so it should not be assumed that data access is free or requires no login.

How to Use This Explanation

If you are trying to understand or evaluate the center's polling:

1. Start with the press release or PDF for the specific poll, not the headline or social post.
2. Check the archive for trend data before drawing conclusions from a single survey.
3. Separate data from interpretation—the center's own guidance is that anecdotes explain elections but should not outrank the data.
4. Note the partnership and purpose behind each poll (election, health, client research), since context shapes what a result can support.

The center's answer to "how reliable are polls?" is, in effect: reliability comes from treating polls as evidence to be examined—method, sample, and full release included—and from resisting the pull of narrative over data.