How The 19th/YouGov poll works

This year, The 19th is partnering with YouGov for our annual State of Our Nation poll, shedding light on issues that impact women and LGBTQ+ people and helping us better understand our country. 

We aim to ask different questions than most other polls. This isn’t about who’s up or who’s down, though polling is invaluable for that.

It’s about attitudes toward reproductive issues, toward trans issues and gender roles. It’s about what Americans are worried about — and what they want their elected officials to do and to leave alone. 

Why we poll

We talk to a lot of people in the course of our reporting on issues that disproportionately affect women, particularly women of color, and LGBTQ+ people. That reporting is invaluable. Polling gives us another tool to shed light on what women and LGBTQ+ people across America think about the state of the country — its politics, its politicians and its systems.

What we did this year 

This year, we worked with YouGov to ask questions about affordability, caregiving, reproductive issues, LGBTQ+ issues, immigration and more. We added questions about trans athletes’ participation in sports that we hadn’t asked before. We also asked about issues like surrogacy, feminism and what the government should do about childcare to try to capture where the country is on issues that are shaping the midterms — and will shape the 2028 presidential race.

YouGov gathered more responses from Gen Z adults than we would have if we were trying for a representative sample of American adults. We did this because as more and more members of Gen Z come of age, we want to know how they see key issues — and how Gen Z men and women might see them differently.

How this poll worked (plus how polls work generally)

No poll asks everyone in the country for their opinion. Pollsters reach out to a representative sample of people and ask a series of questions. Traditionally, the outreach occurred through calls to landlines or cell phones, though now more pollsters are using online or text message surveys, and some use a mix. 

YouGov selects respondents from its panel of millions of registered users and asks them to take a survey. They know the demographics of their users and invite a representative sample to take the survey, and then weight the results to ensure that the sample matches the population. YouGov panelists are compensated; they earn points for each survey they complete, and those points can be exchanged for a small amount of money or the equivalent at various vendors.

But how do you know these answers are accurate?

Even if a pollster is really careful with sampling in the traditional manner, they won’t have an exact replica of the total U.S. population. That’s where weighting comes in. YouGov, like many other pollsters, compares the population who answered the poll to the population at large, looking at things like age, gender, social class, region, voting history and level of education. The survey data is weighted so that it matches the population at large. For example, if a survey had significantly more women respondents than men, weighting ensures that the reported results aren’t skewed due to the sample.

Do we still trust polls?

We trust polls to do what they’re supposed to do: give us information about public opinion at a certain point in time. By themselves, they’re not intended to predict what will happen, and any polling figure has some inherent error. That’s why we share how the survey was conducted and the estimate for the potential error. 

You can see the full data here.

Have more questions about how this poll was done, or how polls work in general? Share them with us. 

This 19th News “State of Our Nation” poll was conducted online by YouGov, which selected respondents from their opt-in panel. It was conducted from September 18 to 24, 2026, with 2,357 adults, including an oversampling of 18- to 29-year-olds. Results were weighted for gender, age, race, education, U.S. region, 2024 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification, and current voter registration status. The margin of error for the overall sample is ± 2.5 points.