Monmouth University reportedly plans to close its polling institute, with sources citing how administrators “felt it was losing too much money while not attracting enough students,” according to a recent report.
Sources familiar with the matter explained to the New Jersey Globe that the university, located in West Long Branch, New Jersey, is “planning to imminently shutter its lauded polling institute.”
In addition to sources citing how university administrators felt the polling institute was losing money, “university leaders” also reportedly felt that polls that the polling institute released that “ended up being inaccurate” were “seen as a possible stain on the university’s image,” according to the outlet.
The outlet noted that the director of the polling institute is Patrick Murray, “a former pollster at the Rutgers University Eagleton Poll,” adding that Murray ended up building the polling institute at Monmouth University “into one of the most well-respected pollsters” in the United States.
The Globe continued:
Murray, a former pollster at the Rutgers University Eagleton Poll, left to join Monmouth University in 2005, and in the following 20 years built the university’s fledgling polling institute into one of the most well-respected pollsters in the nation. The institute, which conducted polls of both New Jersey races and national elections, was consistently rated as an A+ pollster by FiveThirtyEight and was treated as New Jersey’s “gold standard” poll.
🚨Breaking: The gold-standard Monmouth University Polling Institute will soon be shuttered by its university, the NJ Globe has learned – a huge loss for the polling scene in New Jersey and the nation as a whole.https://t.co/beVsspCNjw
— Joey Fox (@joeymdfox) March 7, 2025
A polling report from Monmouth University on October 23, 2024, showed that 41 percent of registered voters said they would “definitely” vote for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, while seven percent said they probably would. The report also found that 39 percent of registered voters said they would “definitely” vote for now-President Donald Trump, while six percent said they probably would.
Trump ended up winning the presidential election with 49.8 percent of the vote, while Harris ended up receiving 48.3 percent, according to CNN.
The reported plan to shut the university’s polling institute down comes as ABC News revealed plans to shut down its 538 poll site, which Breitbart News’s John Nolte described as being a “once-popular” site that had been “touted as a data-driven piece of science that would predict the outcome of elections, along with things like the Oscars,” during its initial years, but later “began to look more like ‘wishcasting,’ and … became a joke.”
Breitbart News reached out to Monmouth University Polling Institute for a statement, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
