The New York Times has begun a new effort to track public opinion surveys, starting by collecting all polls on President Trump’s job approval.

We’ll add more features in coming weeks, including charts showing how the average of the latest polls has changed over time. We also plan to track more types of polls, such as for this year’s governor’s races and next year’s congressional elections.

This project is part of The Times’s broader effort to bring context and clarity to this ubiquitous but difficult-to-understand part of our modern information age. Polls have had good years and bad years; most recently they had an OK year. The number of public polls has risen sharply in recent years, as it has become easier and cheaper to get started as a pollster. At the same time, a number of name-brand pollsters that were trusted for decades have closed.

The result is that it is hard to make sense of all the information we have, even for the most informed among us. We hope this project can help.

As one half of the Times/Siena College poll, which has been recognized as one of the country’s premier pollsters, we believe there’s value in an individual poll. But we also think aggregating polls and providing analysis of them collectively, as we did during last year’s election, is a service worth preserving — one that may be needed even more today with the profusion of polling, contradictory findings and loud partisan voices.

We’re building on the work of the politics website 538, which for several years released this data as a public service until it was shuttered by ABC News this month, and which itself followed in the path of Pollster.com at The Huffington Post. Our goal is to ensure that this resource, which is a foundational tool for many journalists and researchers, remains updated long-term. The data will be made available free for anybody to use as they wish, so long as they provide attribution to The Times. (If you’re still using data collected by 538, you may still need to give it attribution as well.)

To make the transition as easy as possible, we are providing the data in about the same format as 538 did. There are some differences, which are noted at the bottom of this page.

If there is a poll we’re missing or if you have questions about the project, please email the Election Analytics team at polls@nytimes.com.

The data that powers this project is linked at the bottom of our poll tracker.

To make the transition easier for researchers, we are providing the data in approximately the same format as 538 did. These are the known differences:

• The columns poll_id, pollster_id, sponsor_ids, sponsor_candidate_id and question_id refer to the internal identifier The Times uses, rather than the 538 ID. For a map of 538 IDs to the new IDs, please email polls@nytimes.com.

• Display values, such as those for candidates, pollsters and sponsors, may not exactly match the values provided by 538.

• The methodology column may contain different values than those the 538 data set included.

• The state column will use two-character abbreviations, and it will be filled with US to denote a national poll. In the 538 data set, the column was empty for a national poll and used unabbreviated state names.

• The values previously provided in the numeric_grade, pollscore and transparency_score columns have no equivalent in The Times’s data set and are empty.

• The url_article, url_topline, url_crosstab, internal, politician_id columns are not currently operative and are empty, but may be populated in the future.

• The created_at field for entries before March 12, 2025, has been set to the approximate release date of the poll.

If you find a bug or a difference that isn’t noted here, please email polls@nytimes.com.

At launch, the polling tracker was produced by Annie Daniel, Jon Huang, Ruth Igielnik, Jasmine C. Lee, Alex Lemonides, Jonah Smith, Albert Sun, Rumsey Taylor. Additional work by Andrew Chavez, Dan Simmons-Ritchie and Isaac White