The GOP's 2012 poll data left the party stunned on Election Day. New GOP polling firm goal: Catch up

The Republican polling community is about to get a shake-up.

With the GOP still reeling from its defeats in the 2012 election, a new Republican polling firm is seeking to help the party bounce back with a fresh stream of data on the state of the electorate.


The outfit, Harper Polling, launches this week with the goal of putting the party on parity with Democrats in the field of IVR polling — a term that stands for interactive voice response polling, commonly known as “robo-polling.”

For several cycles now, Democrats have benefited from a high-volume, relatively inexpensive flow of survey data from the company Public Policy Polling, which takes hundreds of polls in any given cycle checking up on individual races and national issue debates. Some of those surveys are released to the public, while others are conducted for private purposes by Democratic campaigns and interest groups.

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On the Republican side, candidates and party committees have largely eschewed automated data collection in lieu of more expensive polling taken by live telephone interviews. In 2012, those costlier polls proved inaccurate in many cases, based on flawed assumptions that left the GOP stunned by the scale of its setbacks on Election Day.

Harper Polling founder Brock McCleary, the outgoing polling director and deputy executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the aim of his project is to give the GOP access to flexible, cost-effective polling data that matches what Democrats are producing.

In a way, the project is an extension of a 2011 initiative at the NRCC to conduct in-house IVR polling. That effort was successful enough, according to McCleary, that he decided it would be worth doing on a larger scale.

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“The technology is very affordable and very nimble. Having fast, precise polling was very useful for us,” he said. “This is what PPP is and there’s really no competitor.”

The first wave of data from Harper Polling is expected this week, including message-testing on the fiscal cliff debate on Capitol Hill.

Harper Polling isn’t intended as a clone of PPP on the right, McCleary said, but many of the goals are the same: polling races that get relatively little attention from national and media pollsters, getting status updates on topical debates and releasing data for public consumption in order to inform press coverage.

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“We will touch everything, but I do think that we will probably be most focused on the House. That is my background. Few people, if any, run polls in House races and so I think we will probably end up running more surveys on House races than anyone else over the next two years,” McCleary explained. “I will try to focus a good deal on, what are the party’s competing messages on any given thing that’s happening on the Hill? Or in a campaign — who’s winning the tax fight in a campaign between the two candidates?”

Of the data the firm produces, “the overwhelming majority of it” will be for public consumption, he said.

If the polls are being produced for the benefit of the GOP, that doesn’t mean the results will necessarily line up with what party leaders want to see. One of the essential ingredients of PPP’s success on the Democratic side, strategists agree, has been a certain level of independence from the national party and a willingness to publish unwelcome survey results.

More established pollsters on both sides, but particularly within the GOP, have tended to cast a skeptical gaze on IVR techniques, preferring the higher-cost method of live caller interviews. But a Fordham University study in the aftermath of the 2012 election ranked PPP as the most accurate pollster of the cycle.

A runner-up in Fordham’s rankings was the research company YouGov, which uses another unconventional data-collection method: online polling.

It’s not as if IVR pollsters fared uniformly better in 2012. Rasmussen Reports, another robo-polling firm, ranked very low on accuracy in the Fordham study, adding to its reputation for producing results overly favorable to Republicans. For Harper Polling to play a PPP-like role, it will have to meet a higher standard for accuracy and transparency, and gain wide acceptance as a part of the Republican campaign machinery.

Still, that the GOP would seek to close the robo-polling gap with Democrats is at the very least an indication that IVR methods have become a more standard instrument of the 21st-century campaign.

PPP pollster Tom Jensen said it stands to reason that Republicans would seek to “develop that kind of tool on their side.”

“There are times when a campaign or political organization really just needs to know the score or test one or two issues that have unexpectedly cropped up in a campaign. I’m glad we’ve been able to provide that kind of shorter, faster, less expensive polling on the Democratic side,” he said. “Heck, we’ve had a lot of Republicans try to hire us over the years, so I know that the demand is there.”

The business model for a firm like PPP — or Harper Polling — is not to replace traditional blue-chip pollsters but to produce campaign data that’s cost-prohibitive to collect by other means.

“What we’ve found, especially for higher-level campaigns, is that IVR doesn’t replace live interview polling, but it’s a good supplement. You still need to do the really expensive, detailed benchmark polling. But you really don’t need to spend five figures every week in the month of October to find out if you’re up or down,” Jensen said. “Live interview pollsters who care more about winning than sucking up every dollar possible for themselves understand that. It will be interesting to see how receptive establishment GOP pollsters are to the new entity.”

McCleary, who is headquartered in Harrisburg, Pa., said he doesn’t view Harper Polling as a direct competitor to other GOP firms. Indeed, he said he expects to collaborate with the NRCC and has been in touch about the project with other Republican pollsters, who have been receptive.

Republican strategist Brad Todd, a top NRCC consultant at the media and polling firm OnMessage Inc., said the world of congressional race polling, especially, is ripe for a new entrant on the IVR side.

“There’s a big space in the market for a public IVR polling shop with a big focus on House races and on legislation moving through Capitol Hill,” Todd said. “Most public pollsters seem to be afraid of polling much in the House, because it requires a more granular understanding of the terrain than polling nationally or on statewide races does.”

Todd continued: “Brock has the expertise and the comfort with the details of House districts to bring something totally new to the market.”