What do the polls say about the key races this election?

By Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN

(CNN) — We’re just days away from 2025’s off-year elections. Beyond how the races themselves turn out, the contests will be a valuable source of data to analyze – and perhaps overanalyze – ahead of next year’s midterms.

Here’s an overview of what the polls suggest about the four big races we’re watching this year.

A note: Polls are a valuable tool for understanding the electorate, but they’re most useful when they’re treated as estimates rather than attempts to predict the future with pinpoint precision. Often, what they tell us about the broader political environment is more valuable than the exact margin that any specific survey finds for a race.

Virginia statewide races

Virginia’s election for governor takes place in the shadow of an unpopular GOP administration in Washington, DC. A Washington Post-Schar School poll asked voters to describe the most important issue in the race. The share who responded with negative comments about President Donald Trump or Republicans came second only to concerns about economic issues and the cost of living.

The Post-Schar poll, which found Democrat Abigail Spanberger with a 12-point lead over Republican Winsome Earle-Sears among likely voters, joins other recent surveys in the state that show Spanberger with a stable advantage in the race. There’s much more uncertainty in the other statewide races, particularly the campaign for attorney general, where polls show support for Democrat Jay Jones facing some erosion after the publication of text messages in which he fantasized about killing a legislative colleague.

New Jersey governor

New Jersey’s gubernatorial race is a tale of two incumbents: Trump is unpopular there as well, but the state’s outgoing Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, also draws closely divided ratings for his time in office. Many recent surveys of the race, including polls from Quinnipiac University, Fox News, Fairleigh Dickinson University and the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll, have found Democrat Mikie Sherrill with an edge among likely voters, hovering around the 50% mark, while her opponent, Republican Jack Ciattarelli, stands closer to 45%.

Quinnipiac’s latest poll, like several others, found that Ciattarelli’s supporters were more likely than Sherrill’s to express strong enthusiasm about their chosen candidate, although Sherrill’s favorability ratings remained higher overall.

New York City mayor

New York City’s multi-candidate mayoral race poses a unique challenge for pollsters. Surveys of likely voters, however, have been largely consistent in showing Democrat Zohran Mamdani with a double-digit lead over his nearest rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, with Republican Curtis Sliwa in third. They differ on the precise scope of Mamdani’s advantage, although most have found him shy of clearing a majority of support in the race.

In polls released Thursday by Marist College and Fox News, Mamdani was buoyed by positive favorability ratings and broad support among younger voters, while older voters broke for Cuomo.

California redistricting

Perhaps nowhere is the role of national politics as clear as in California, where voters are weighing Proposition 50, a ballot measure to temporarily enact a new congressional map drawn by Democrats in response to Republican-driven redistricting in other states.

A mid-October poll from CBS/YouGov found 62% of likely voters in support of Proposition 50, while an October Public Policy Institute of California poll put that support at 56%. It’s worth noting that past research has found that polling sometimes overshoots support for initiatives that implement new changes – whether liberal or conservative – because some voters default to preferring the status quo.

Half of likely voters said in the CBS/YouGov poll that their decision had more to do with national issues and politics than with state or local issues. Broad majorities of likely voters supporting Proposition 50 said their choice was driven by the desire to oppose Trump, to oppose national Republicans and to support national Democrats.

A note on the state of polling

How have polls been performing lately? A new postmortem report on 2024 election polling, released Wednesday by the American Association for Public Opinion Research, found that polling in last year’s election was significantly more accurate than it was in 2020 or 2016 even as it continued to underestimate Republican vote shares for the third straight presidential cycle. (Polls in the 2022 and 2018 midterms both saw smaller directional errors.)

As the report also noted, polls last year weren’t always able to estimate the ways that turnout changed between 2020 and 2024. That bears mentioning because all of these surveys reflect pollsters’ best estimations about who’s likely to end up voting in an off-year election – and how much that might differ from four years ago, at the start of former President Joe Biden’s administration.

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