American Research Group

American Research Group, Incorporated is a U.S. opinion polling and marketing research company based in Manchester, New Hampshire, and founded in 1985. The president is Lafell Dickinson Bennett, known as Dick Bennett, who was the pollster for presidential candidate John B. Anderson in 1980. Other pollsters and journalists point to ARG's poor track record.

Pollster Mark Blumenthal reported that "It is important to note that what ARG does ... is very different from the way other pollsters ask about party ID. ARG asks about party registration in some states, party identification in others and then combines the two results into a single variable. Whatever the merits of this approach, the results will not be comparable to those of other polling organizations."

In 2004, Gallup interviewed ARG about a poor prediction (22 points adrift) in the Maryland Democratic primary and found their "likely voter" model was "based on just the one question, [which] is a relatively simple approach to classifying voters."

ARG was criticised in 2007 for only using landline respondents, which they justified by arguing that cellular phone users, who are mostly younger people, mostly "don't vote".

As of 2016, ARG received a C+ rating from FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver has long critiqued ARG. In 2008, he wrote in Daily Kos about their poor track record and later challenged Bennett to a polling contest that the latter did not take up. ARG was noted by Silver as performing particularly poorly in the 2012 US presidential election: "Polls by American Research Group ... largely missed the mark ... American Research Group has long been unreliable." In 2016, Washington Monthly noted of ARG, based on FiveThirtyEight's analysis, that they have a slight Republican bias but more importantly, "They do not appear to be good at their jobs."

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