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University president Dr. Patrick Leahy announced the closing of the Monmouth University Polling Institute in a community-wide letter on Wednesday, Mar. 12. The institute will officially close on Tuesday, July 1.
The decision follows a year-long review of all university centers and institutes, with school leadership ultimately determining the polling firm "is no longer aligned with our current strategic goals."
"The changing political and media landscapes have made it both more difficult and more expensive for polling organizations to operate," Dr. Leahy wrote. "In addition, 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.
"The considerable resources required to operate the polling institute annually will be redeployed to other strategic initiatives at Monmouth, in particular to those activities that offer direct transformational impact on our students."
The announcement came shortly after data website FiveThirtyEight shut down on Wednesday, Mar. 5. Parent company ABC News laid off the entire staff of the popular poll tracking website founded by political statistician Nate Silver.
Pollster Patrick Murray, a frequent guest on cable news shows, has run Monmouth's polling institute since it was founded in 2005.
"I am grateful to Patrick and his team for their decades of service to the university, and I am especially appreciative for their efforts to deliver on the institute's mission to foster greater public accountability by ensuring that the public's voice was heard," Dr. Leahy said.
The institute helped the West Long Branch college earn national recognition, with FiveThirtyEight giving it an A+ rating in 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2020 (the website didn't update its rankings in 2017).
"If there was a 'winner' for the 2020 primaries, it was Monmouth University, whose average error of 7.5 points was the lowest among firms that released five or more primary polls," former FiveThirtyEight senior editor Nathaniel Rakich wrote.
Since its launch, the institute has been a leader in public opinion research, covering national and state elections. The polling firm also conducted studies on public policy, including post-Hurricane Sandy recovery research and evaluations of local government transparency.
Murray helped create Monmouth's institute after working for more than a decade at Rutgers University as a pollster for the Eagleton Institute of Politics.
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