it is the end of an era for one of New Jersey's most renowned National polling centers the Monmouth University polling Institute announced it'll shut down and its leader Patrick Murray whom you've seen plenty of times on this broadcast will leave the university polling has come under Fire since the 2020 election as both pundits and politicians questioned their accuracy in the ability to truly capture the pulse of the nation at the same time Federal funding to universities could be at risk making it harder to support polling programs senior political correspondent David Cruz looks at the legacy of the mammoth polling Institute and what its closure means for the political world it's a sad day for all of us this this had uh this is a huge loss for the state don't let anybody tell you that you're a chicken little warning that the sky is falling because it kind of is newspapers radio stations and online news outlets shuttering their doors and now the mammoth University poll one of the leading polling institutes in the country about to shut down too Ashley coning runs the Eagleton Center for public interest polling now one of just two polling institutes left in the state polls are a really integral part of that small D Democratic process we're able to representatively present the voices of the public of the population under study back to policy makers and to the press and that's an integral part of this society that we live in but in this day of instant internet polls and rent the partisan pollster voters have lost interest and faith in polls and says dan Casino who runs the fdu poll which just published three polls last week that kind of erosion is bad for business in the business where the margin for error is minuscule the business model of public polling honestly has never made a whole lot of sense because public polling we take our best product the public polls and we give them away for free to people so as a business model it's not great and it works as a loss leader right so most polls are bringing in outside clients uh that pay for polls or you are doing as a loss leader for advertising and so for decades polling has been basically funded by newspapers and by universities and the cracks in that Foundation have been evident for some time so fewer funding sources and more people who don't answer their phones equals fewer polls now just two in New Jersey uh when I started doing poll in Jersey almost 20 years ago we had six or seven polls that frequently ran questions here in New Jersey and nowadays it's really two it's us at fdu and it's Eagleton are all that's left and that's a problem it's a problem because this is the primary way in which uh elected officials get information about policies Republican consultant Chris Russell is a polling skeptic has been since 2021 when a mammoth University poll showed his gubernatorial candidate Jack chiarelli trailing Phil Murphy by double digits which ended up being off by eight points in the final count Russell says that cost his campaign in dollars momentum and probably votes I'm a fan of no public polls that's fine by me because any campaign that at that level is doing their own internal poll uh they know what they know about the race uh and hopefully their polling is right right that's always a big test inside of campaigns it's a difficult thing to poll correctly these days because of the way the the voter landscape is changing uh the way we're in some kind of a political realignment here I think some of the old rules don't apply and that makes it challenging to get a sample that's representative which often then leads to bad numbers it means we one more way that we're Flying Blind so as the media is Contracting as um the people whose eyes are on politics every day is is shrinking um we have one less set of data points now um and it is happening fast just another way that it's getting harder to find out the things you need to know about the issues and people who directly affect your life resulting in fewer educated voters in a time when the opposite is more critical than ever I'm David Cruz NJ Spotlight news [Music]