Oklahoma's only independent, non-partisan pollster, since 2004.
SoonerPoll was founded in Spring 2004 by Bill Shapard, who believed that public opinion polling in Oklahoma was either by Democrat pollsters or Republican pollsters and the Oklahoma media needed an independent source for polling.
SoonerPoll is Oklahoma’s only independent, non-partisan pollster that performs political and issue-oriented polling for the state’s news media and various associations and interest groups in the state. Since our founding, we've become the leading public opinion polling firm in the state of Oklahoma. As of 2006, SoonerPoll has conducted more polls for the Oklahoma media than all other public opinion pollsters combined.
SoonerPoll started as a dot-com in order to provide online access to its published poll results. Today, our website contains the largest library of the views and opinions of Oklahomans in the state.
In 2005, SoonerPoll became the pollster of record for the Tulsa World and has conducted over 40 polls for their Oklahoma Poll, producing hundreds of stories for their print and online publications over the past decade.
Since 2008, SoonerPoll has been polling for News9 in Oklahoma City and Newson6 in Tulsa, the two largest television stations in their respective markets. Both stations are CBS affiliates and owned by Griffin Communications.
In 2010, SoonerPoll begin a quarterly poll that enables the news media, associations and interest groups in the state to add select questions without having to commission a stand-alone poll.
In 2012, SoonerPoll announced a change to its methodology that now consists of a dual frame of landline and cell phones in order to account for the rapid changes occurring in cell phone usage.
In 2014, Nate Silver’s 538 rated 337 pollsters in the nation, and SoonerPoll was rated the BEST pollster in the state of Oklahoma and in the TOP TEN percent of best pollsters in the nation.
SoonerPoll’s success is due in large part to its internal data collection process, and having never sub-contracted the data collection of the polling process to call center vendors as other polling firms do. By doing so, SoonerPoll is able to control its entire polling process and produce a more accurate result which traditional partisan pollsters who use sub-contractors are simply unable to do.
SoonerPoll also maintains an internal, comprehensive voter database of the state of Oklahoma which assists SoonerPoll in sampling and likely voter modeling.
SoonerPoll is a member of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and abides by the highest set of ethical standards and best practices in the industry.
Starting 2015, SoonerPoll began releasing with every publicly-released poll, a Call Disposition and Rate Calculation Report, a ground-breaking effort to provide some of the greatest transparency in the industry today.
Into the elections of 2016 and 2018, participation in the SoonerPoll remained high but it was becoming increasingly harder and harder to reach selected voters as more and more people have ported to a cellphone only and dropped their landline phone number altogether. At the same time, data append services have been slow to increase their cell phone append percentages, so a large portion of the electorate becomes unreachable.
In late 2019, SoonerPoll began building a "voter panel" of likely voters in the state who agreed to participate in our polls when contacted by text or email, and be compensated for their participation. Every poll put into the field in SoonerPoll's in-house call center where participants are selected at random in order to preserve a strong probability sample, participants are asked if they would like to join the voter panel. This is the only way for participants to join the voter panel.
Today, the voter panel remains the greatest asset of SoonerPoll and its ability to effectively poll the electorate.
For more information about SoonerPoll, our methodologies, our polling results or services, call us at 405/607-4664 or email us at bill@shapard.com
