Shorenstein Center (Harvard Kennedy School)

How to Access Decades of U.S. Public Opinion Polls Through Roper iPoll (Session 2 of 2, 3/4/26)

The second session of the Roper iPoll webinar introduced a free, one‑year membership aimed at small news outlets and independent journalists, allowing them to tap into the Roper Center’s vast public‑opinion archive. The archive holds roughly 915,000 U.S. poll questions from 1935 onward, contributed by over 3,000 organizations ranging from AARP to CNN. Users can search by keyword, curated topics, health categories, state, sample type, and interview date, and can narrow results with Boolean operators. Presenters Alexis Bordal and Kathleen Welden highlighted practical examples, such as an immigration‑topic search that returned nearly 12,000 questions across 3,365 studies, and demonstrated cross‑tab downloads that break down responses by age, gender, or ethnicity when source datasets permit. They also stressed that every entry meets AAPOR‑style methodological standards. For journalists and researchers, the platform democratizes access to decades of polling data, enabling richer storytelling, fact‑checking, and trend analysis without the cost barriers traditionally faced by larger newsrooms.