Meet the 4 Colleges That May Be Sad to See Election Season End

The season is almost over, and Paul R. Brown, the president of Monmouth University, is waving the flag for his team during the stretch run.

“I’m a competitive person, and we’re playing on the national stage,” says Mr. Brown, “and I have made a big financial commitment to play on the national stage.”

The main contenders in Tuesday’s big game are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, but Monmouth’s rooting interest is clear. Regardless of the outcome of the election, Mr. Brown is pulling for the stat geeks at the university’s vaunted Polling Institute to guess the voting margins more accurately than their counterparts at other university-based polling centers, several of which reside with Monmouth’s rival colleges in the otherwise obscure Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference.

Monmouth and its peers might be the only ones sorry to see the presidential campaign come to an end. They have attained fame as oracles of a national competition that runs much longer than bowl season or March Madness. Their names are repeated on the radio and on television in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and on national broadcasts every time they release new snapshots of the presidential and local horse races.

“Our admissions officers have told us every interaction they have with students in the region and the country, they immediately talk about polling,” says Mr. Brown. The president said he has heard the value of the free media exposure estimated at close to $1 billion.

It’s been an intense election season for the pollster colleges of the MAAC. Marist College, the first college in the conference to become well-known for polling, had some of its polls co-signed by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal. Quinnipiac University, which recruited its president, John L. Lahey, from Marist in the 1980s and promptly started a polling operation of its own, has been ubiquitous. Siena College, a small Roman Catholic institution in Albany, N.Y., has edged closer to center stage, thanks to a partnership between its polling institute and The New York Times.

The presidential race is a publicity bonanza for the colleges, which rarely find themselves in the national spotlight otherwise. Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, recalls a time back in the 1980s when the center for the college’s basketball team, Rik Smits, was drawing national attention as the “Dunkin’ Dutchman.” Marist’s longtime president, Dennis J. Murray, who recently moved to emeritus status, would tell people that his institution had two pillars of visibility, “one that’s 7-foot-5, and the other that’s 5-foot-5" — a crack at Mr. Miringoff’s diminutive stature. (The professor says Mr. Murray was being generous; he’s actually 5-foot-3.)

The 2016 campaign season has seen the MAAC schools continuing to stand tall among their higher-education brethren even as dozens of other colleges have tried to insinuate themselves into conversations about who’s up and who’s down in the national political scene.

FiveThirtyEight, a data-based news site that has emerged as a kind of ombudsman for the polling industry, this year identified nearly a hundred colleges and universities that have tried their hands at polling. The site assigned grades to each one based on their methods and usefulness for predicting winners. Most institutions earned B’s or C’s, with a couple (sorry, Brigham Young and Millersville Universities) scoring in the D range.

Marist, Monmouth, Quinnipiac and Siena all scored in the A range.

Polling is not a sport, but the fact that it generates high-profile drama that can ultimately be reduced to a bottom-line tally makes it different from a lot of university-based research. “There are so many things that other people do, where they’re professional, they’re well-trained, they work as hard as they can,” says Don Levy, director of the Siena Research Institute, “but they don’t issue a number that then is assessed relative to a final score.”

The directors of the polling centers downplay any feelings of competition among the colleges. More than anything there is solidarity among pollsters who try to promote scientific analysis in a climate of fanatical rooting. Campaigns and sporting events might be all about winning, but public-opinion researchers feel more like teammates than opponents. Inaccurate polls, they say, are bad for everybody.

This year, rival pollsters have posed less of a threat to their reputations than has Mr. Trump, the Republican candidate, who has charged that the polls (among other institutions) are biased against him. Some people seem worried he might be telling the truth.

“I get more … ‘feedback,’ we’ll call it, from private citizens than ever before,” says Mr. Levy. “It doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s not uncommon to pick up the phone in my office, or to open my email, and there’s somebody using multiple f-words.”

Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth’s Polling Institute, has also noticed a change. “We’ve dealt with a lot more vitriol from supporters,” he says. “Every election we’ll get some of that, but this year it’s been unprecedented.”

Monmouth faced an unexpected crisis in September when a “polling memo,” written on university letterhead, appeared online. The memo purported to reveal a conspiracy by the Monmouth pollsters to suppress evidence of a massive lead for Mr. Trump in Florida, a key battleground state.

It was a fake, created by a moderate Republican who later told The Daily Beast that he was trying to expose the low grade of evidence of shadowy pro-Clinton machinations that Mr. Trump’s supporters would accept as credible. Sure enough, a lot of people seemed to believe that Monmouth really was stacking the deck against the Republican nominee. (In another fake memo by the same author, this one supposedly obtained from Public Policy Polling, Monmouth’s polling institute is alluded to as a den of iniquity, while Quinnipiac’s team is alleged to be partaking of “Bernie-grade weed.”)

For Mr. Brown, the Monmouth president, the phony “leak” was no laughing matter. He directed university lawyers to send a series of cease-and-desist letters, including one to Scribd, which had the hoax memo removed from its document-hosting service. The Monmouth pollsters absorbed a lot of criticism on social media anyway, and Mr. Murray received a threat that prompted the college to increase security patrols around the building where the center is housed.

“Preservation of our most precious assets — boy, it’s crucial,” says Mr. Brown, and the reputation and security of Monmouth’s polling operation is precious indeed. “I’m not going to fool around with this.”

The colleges hope their last polls, nationwide and in various battleground states, line up with the final tallies — or, at least, are not so wildly off the mark that they attract the wrong kind of media attention. The electorate has been more ambivalent than in the past, with Mrs. Clinton’s lead narrowing amid a series of are-they-or-aren’t-they “October surprises.” The prescience of a poll might have a lot to do with how close to Election Day it was taken.

On Monday, Monmouth released the results of its final poll before the election. Mrs. Clinton was up 6 points nationwide. Quinnipiac’s final nationwide poll, conducted in the middle of October, showed a 7-point margin, with more votes going to third-party candidates. Marist’s final nationwide poll, based on a phone survey last week, shows a tighter race, with Mrs. Clinton edging Mr. Trump by 1 point.

An important difference exists between the presidential race and the colleges competing on the polling margins: The latter is not a zero-sum game. If the goal is to boost name recognition and school pride, all four MAAC colleges have already won.

“Obviously, you look for bragging rights,” says Patrick Murray, of Monmouth, “but it’s not because we’re trying to beat others into submission.”

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.

Correction (11/8/2016, 12:55 p.m.): This article has been corrected from the original version, which contained inaccurate figures in describing the final nationwide polls conducted by Quinnipiac and Marist. In addition, in the second sidebar, an inaccurate number in the results for Quinnipiac has been updated.