Markos Moulitsas is a singular success story of the new media business. After the Army and college, in 2002 he founded the original, ultimate liberal group blog, Daily Kos, which has survived all competitors and is now basically the last of its kind. He cofounded the sports site SBNation in 2003, a company that would become Vox Media.



I’ve known Moulitsas from the small world of political blogs, just a little, for years, and back in March 2014, I realized that he’d been awfully quiet, so I emailed him to ask what he was up to.

“I ask because you've always been up to such interesting things: SBNation (which weirdly people don't seem to know you started); Daily Kos; and then you were maybe the first of the big bloggers to realize that moment had passed, and to step away,” I wrote him. “So I got it into my head that you're probably working on the next big thing and I wondered what it was.”

“I've always got stuff percolating, but nothing I'm ready to announce just yet,” he replied. “Sorry!”

This Sunday, just shy of four years later, he replied on that old email thread. Moulitsas has been up to something, it just took a little longer than he expected. And what Moulitsas has been up to is characteristically ambitious and characteristically a bit apart from everyone else’s obsessions: He’s been building a public opinion research company.

What makes his company, Civiqs, different is the scale of data it has collected: The company says it has — through years of online advertising — recruited a geographically and ideologically diverse panel of nearly a million volunteers, and counting, who take short daily online surveys; respondents are also matched to lists of voters. Civiqs uses that giant pool to ask 150 questions every day. And that scale and regularity means that it can see national opinion trends develop — and then easily and significantly slice them along demographic or geographical lines.

Political and commercial survey research is increasingly shifting to online panels like Civiqs, though traditionalists defend telephone polling. But the new platform's scale and sophistication marks "a major development in polling, and a really exciting one at that," says Dan Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has taken a look at Civiqs’ operation as an unpaid adviser.

In one striking example, Civiqs’ data shows how every recent mass shooting has affected public opinion, and the real shock Parkland delivered to the American system — and particularly to the views of white suburban women whose votes will be key to the 2018 midterms: