The Monmouth University Polling Institute forecast that New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a Democrat, would win re-election by between 8 and 14 percentage points. In other words, he’d cruise to victory.
But Murphy barely edged his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli. With 90% of the vote reported, Murphy leads with 50.7% of the vote; Ciattarelli garnered 48.5%.
In a Thursday op-ed for The Star-Ledger, Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, admitted he “blew it.”
“I owe an apology to Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign — and to Phil Murphy’s campaign for that matter — because inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts. But most of all I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading,” Murray wrote.
He added: “I take my responsibility as a public pollster seriously. Some partisan critics think we have some agenda about who wins or loses. I can only assume they have never met a public pollster. The thing that keeps us up at night — our “religion” as it were — is simply getting the numbers right.“
Murray wrote that “the growing perception that polling is broken cannot be easily dismissed” and noted that respected organizations – like the Gallup Poll and the Pew Research Center – have abandoned election polling in recent years.
“Perhaps that is a wise move. If we cannot be certain that these polling misses are anomalies then we have a responsibility to consider whether releasing horse race numbers in close proximity to an election is making a positive or negative contribution to the political discourse,” Murray mused.
Read the full Op-Ed at NJ.com.