Quinnipiac University Polling Institute

The Quinnipiac University Polling Institute is a public opinion polling center based at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. It surveys public opinion in Connecticut, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and nationally.

It is considerably larger than other academic polling centers, including the Franklin & Marshall College Poll, which only surveys Pennsylvania. The organization employs about 160 interviewers, generally drawing from political science, communications, psychology, and sociology majors, as well as some interviewers that are not affiliated with the university. The poll has a full-time staff of ten. The university does not disclose the Institute's operating budget, and the poll does not accept clients or outside funding.

In 2007, the institute underwent construction of a new two-story building that was expected to double its available capacity to 160 calling cubicles. The purpose of the capacity expansion was to allow the institute to poll multiple states at once, rectifying a problem that arose during the 2006 Connecticut Senate election where other polls were canceled to support that poll.

Quinnipiac

The Quinnipiac—rarely spelled Quinnipiack—is the English name for the Eansketambawg (meaning “original people”; c.f., Ojibwe: Anishinaabeg and Blackfoot: Niitsítapi), a Native American nation of the Algonquian family who inhabited the Wampanoki (i.e., “Dawnland”; c.f., Ojibwe: Waabanaki, Abenaki: Wabanakiyik) region, including present-day Connecticut.

Introduction

The Quinnipiac (occasionally misspelled Quinnipiack) people—also known as Quiripi and Renapi—are speakers of the r-dialect of the Algonquian language family. (The Algonquian Language Phyla was the largest in North America and covered about one-third of the continent above Mexico.) The Quinnipiac/Quiripi/Renapi people are considered to be the first of the indigenous peoples to be placed on a reservation (by the English in 1638), under the first of several treaties which resulted in additional reservations at Branford, Madison, Derby, and Farmington. J.H. Trumbull was the first to recognize that the New Haven band of the Quiripi was only one band or sub-sachemship and not the entire tribal nation. Linguist Blair Rudes found that the Eastern Algonquian r-dialect group's “territory extended “… up to the Hudson in the west, including a portion of land in present-day New York state…. Furthermore… the same people occupied a portion of … western Long Island ….” Since 1997, more extensive research, based on linguistics and early historical records, has extended the boundaries of the 1500-1600 AD Quiripi/Renapi/Quinnipiac confederacies to include all of what is now Connecticut, eastern New York, northern New Jersey, and half of Long Island (prior to the immigration of the Pequot/Mohegan peoples into eastern CT).