the staff of the Ridgewood blog
West Long Branch NJ, well, well, well—looks like another bastion of “objective” polling bites the dust. Monmouth University has announced that it will be shutting down its Polling Institute after 20 years of delivering oh-so-accurate predictions about national and state elections.
The End of an Era… or Just the End of Bad Polling?
Monmouth University President Patrick F. Leahy declared the July 1, 2025, execution date in a statement dripping with nostalgia for the institute’s glorious past.
“Following a year-long review of all of the University’s Centers and Institutes, I have made the decision, in close collaboration with our Board of Trustees, to close the Monmouth University Polling Institute.”
Translation: Our biased polling wasn’t cutting it anymore, and it’s too expensive to keep pretending it does.
Leahy lavished praise on the institute’s founding director, Patrick Murray, who made Monmouth a go-to source for totally unbiased election forecasts—you know, the kind that somehow always skewed left but still got labeled as independent.
FiveThirtyEight: The Gold Standard of… Getting It Wrong?
For those keeping track, FiveThirtyEight, another polling powerhouse (cough leftist echo chamber cough), is also closing up shop. They ranked Monmouth as one of the top five most “accurate” election pollsters—which is probably why the 2020 and 2022 polls were such smashing successes, right?
“At its height, the Institute played a prominent role in helping to elevate the University’s image and amplify its reputation nationwide.”
Oh, absolutely. What better way to boost your credibility than by continuously underestimating Republican turnout?
Blaming the “Changing Political Landscape”
Of course, Leahy couldn’t just admit that trust in mainstream polling has plummeted. Instead, he blamed the “changing political and media landscapes”, which is academia-speak for:
📉 People stopped buying what we were selling.
💰 It’s expensive to keep up the charade.
🎓 Even our students weren’t that interested.
“Our efforts over the years to integrate the work of the Polling Institute with both the student experience and the broader academic enterprise at Monmouth University have been met with mixed results.”
Translation: Even liberal arts majors didn’t want to touch this one.
Monmouth’s New “Strategic Initiatives”
So, where will all those polling resources go now? Well, that remains to be seen, but let’s take a wild guess:
🔹 More DEI initiatives?
🔹 Another gender studies department?
🔹 A think tank dedicated to proving that “democracy is on the ballot” every time a Republican runs?
One thing is clear—Monmouth is done with polling, and frankly, America is probably better off for it.
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It’s about f….ing time . pissing away NJ taxpayer $$ on false polling
Everyone knows the polls are fake. The real question is how much cash Monmouth received for the phony polls?
Polling has become obsolete with technology -multiple
media sources – changing demographics –