How We Choose Poll Results

Americans Agree tracks what Americans agree on politically in recent national polls. We do so in a curated way, focusing on poll results:

From independent, high-quality polls
About policies, not people, general attitudes, or campaigns
About ongoing debates (policies that have not been enacted or, if enacted, could still be a target for modification or rollback)

Further details follow.

Poll quality

In assessing the quality of a poll, we consider the following criteria:

Independent, reputable polling firms: We look for polls from well-established polling firms with no political affiliations or conflicts of interest. We favor members of The American Association for Public Opinion Research’s Transparency Initiative.
Polls without political agendas: We reject polls by political pollsters or independent pollsters sponsored by politically aligned organizations. For example, advocacy organizations sometimes tout poll results that, upon close inspection, the organizations themselves paid for. Although advocate-sponsored polls can be unbiased, there is always a question about potential conflicts of interest, so we steer clear of them.
Breakouts by party or equivalent: A poll result must provide separate response percentages for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents (or equivalent groupings such as partitioning Independents into Republican-leaners and Democrat-leaners).
National representative sample: The poll should sample the U.S. population by normally accepted means of representation and reliability. The sample size should be at least 1,000 respondents.
Wording disclosed: The poll needs to include the specific wording of any question/item that we report on, so we can verify neutral language.
About policies: The specific item should ask about something the government is doing or should be doing (a policy or concept for a policy). We do not cover items that elicit attitudes, such as positive or negative feelings about the economy or political candidates or officeholders.

We evaluate these criteria together. To qualify for inclusion, a poll result should meet our standards across all criteria.

Recency

We focus on “recent” national polls, but what does that mean?

When we started the project in July 2025, we reached back a few years to populate our initial list of poll results. After that, we added new poll results as they were published by independent national pollsters.

If a new poll result asks the same question as an older poll result, we feature the newest result and link to older results as part of the featured result’s “Details” section.

Topics

Our goal is to cover a full range of political topics that have multi-majority agreement and are part of ongoing debates. In doing this, we favor quality over quantity. We don’t want to overwhelm readers with a long list of poll results where many are overly niche or are not really the subject of debate. We are looking for results about issues people recognize and that have clear consequences.

We’ve found that most topics—even the highly polarized ones like abortion, immigration, and guns—have points of agreement within them. However, there are some topics with no points of agreement captured by polls. So if you see an obvious topic that’s missing, it’s not due to disinterest but rather lack of agreement across parties on any aspects of note. An example of this would be tariff policy circa mid-2025, when we launched Americans Agree. At that time, tariffs were all over the news, but the polling was not finding any agreement about what American policy should or should not be.