Public Policy Polling (PPP) is an Americanpolling firm affiliated with theDemocratic Party.[1][2][3] Founded in 2001 by businessman Dean Debnam, the firm is based inRaleigh,North Carolina. Debnam died in 2024.[4] Tom Jensen serves as the firm's director.[5]
In addition to political issues, PPP has conducted polling on comical topics. These include surveys of whether Republican voters believeBarack Obama would be eligible to enterheaven in the event of theRapture,[6] whetherhipsters should be subjected to a special tax for being annoying,[7] and whetherTed Cruz is the Zodiac Killer.[8][9]
PPP first entered prominence through its performance in the 2008 Democratic primaries betweenBarack Obama andHillary Clinton. The company performed well, producing accurate predictions in states ranging from South Carolina to Wisconsin, many of which featured inaccurate results by other pollsters.[10][non-primary source needed][11] After the November election, PPP was ranked by theWall Street Journal as one of the two most accurate firms, among those who were most active in the presidential swing states.[2]
PPP was the first pollster to findScott Brown with a lead overMartha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate special election; Brown ultimately won in a major comeback, and PPP's final poll in that race predicted Brown's winning margin exactly.[12]
PPP was praised in two articles frompolitico.com for its accuracy in polling the 2011primaries andspecial elections, which are notoriously hard to predict. The contests they accurately predicted include the West Virginia gubernatorial primaries, special elections in New York and California,[13][14] as well as all eight Wisconsinrecall elections.
A study byFordham University found that, of 28 firms studied, PPP had the most accurate poll on the presidential national popular vote, both its independently conducted poll and the one it does in collaboration with theDaily Kos and theSEIU.[15][16]PPP correctly called the winner of the presidential election in all 19 states it polled in the final week of the election, as well as the winners of all the U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races it surveyed.[17][18][19][20][21]
Political research firmYouGov found PPP's gubernatorial polls to have the lowest average margin of error among national firms that polled in at least five gubernatorial races in the month preceding the election.[22]
In 2013 columnistNate Cohn described PPP as a liberal pollster.[31] StatisticianNate Silver stated that PPP had a tendency to slightly lean Democratic by 1% as of January 2022.[32] As of January 2022, Silver's website,FiveThirtyEight, gave PPP a A− grade in its pollster ranking.[32]
