How PollCubby works

PollCubby reads polls from the VoteHub polling API, which is free and licensed CC BY 4.0. VoteHub is credited here, and every poll also links to the pollster’s own release. When VoteHub has not listed a release yet, a person can add that poll by hand in the manual poll file. Hand entry is how the current Trump approval, generic-ballot, and direction-of-country figures stay current.

Polls sponsored or commissioned by a campaign, a party, a PAC, or another partisan group are left out. PollCubby uses VoteHub’s sponsor list and partisan flag for that decision. Rasmussen Reports and Trafalgar Group are included.

A poll qualifies when its fieldwork ended within 14 days of the updated date. If one pollster has more than one poll in that window, PollCubby keeps the latest end date. If that release was published for more than one population, likely voters come before registered voters, who come before adults.

When at least three pollsters qualify, the headline is a recency-weighted average. A poll that ended on the updated date has weight 15. A poll that ended 14 days earlier has weight 1. Weights in between fall by one point per day. For each side, multiply the poll’s number by its weight, add those products, and divide by the total weight. The result is shown to one decimal. The spread is the gap between the two sides after that rounding. Every qualifying poll is included once that three-poll minimum is met.

When fewer than three pollsters qualify, PollCubby does not publish an average. It shows the latest poll and labels it. If that fieldwork ended before the 14-day window, the label says so.

A scheduled job checks VoteHub about every six hours, recomputes the figures, and stores them with an updated time. The new figures publish on their own. A poll more than about 10 points off the average, a poll missing sponsor information, or a failed VoteHub fetch is written to a review log for a person to look at. Those flags do not stop publication. A poll with a broken number, date, or link is left out.

PollCubby is reviewed and approved by humans, with AI assistance.

Polls can be wrong. People change their minds, samples miss people, and the wording of a question changes the answer. This is an average of recent polls, not a prediction.