Strategists failed to anticipate the diversity and scale of the Democratic turnout. GOP looks for answers on polling

The campaign arm of the congressional GOP is moving to reboot its polling operation after a messy 2012 cycle, the first concrete remedy taken by the Republican side since candidates and outside groups were left stunned on Election Day by results that their internal data never came close to predicting.

The National Republican Congressional Committee is the first GOP entity to take specific steps to try to rectify the party’s widely acknowledged polling debacle. Republican strategists confirmed after the end of the 2012 race that a huge slice of their survey data was based on flawed assumptions, and failed to anticipate the diversity and scale of turnout on the Democratic side.


The Republicans’ 17-seat House majority is their last bulwark against full Democratic control of the federal government, and senior party officials say they don’t intend to lose that firewall thanks to shoddy polling.

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With that in mind, the NRCC has gathered its top pollsters for a series of meetings and conference calls in the first months of 2013, bringing together prominent commercial rivals for conversations about how to right an embattled political industry.

The cornerstone of their effort, officials say, is a large-scale NRCC project to model the electorate in the several dozen districts that will determine control of the House. The committee has formed a new Strategy Department tasked with projecting district-by-district population changes and mapping best- and worst-case turnout scenarios for campaigns to use in guiding their surveys.

The new division is organized under John Rogers, a former regional political director, and will work closely with the NRCC’s polling vendors in its modeling project.

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The NRCC-organized talks between pollsters have also produced a set of standards and practices that campaigns will be urged to follow for 2014. Pollsters will be expected to have at least 30 percent of their samples made up of cell phone users, if not more – an attempt to capture more of the Democratic-leaning young voters who eluded GOP survey-gatherers last year.

In districts with significant Hispanic populations, party officials will urge campaigns to spring for Spanish-language call centers in order to survey less-assimilated Hispanic respondents who may not answer a poll in English.

The measures may be expensive, but the strategists mapping out the 2014 campaign say it’s absolute necessary to ensure candidates don’t find themselves effectively flying blind after Labor Day of 2014.

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“We are modeling and analyzing districts like we never have before and we are working closely with pollsters to make sure our data and research is precise,” said Liesl Hickey, the executive director of the NRCC.

Participants in the NRCC’s polling discussions described them as collegial and candid – an unusual, Godfather-like setting in which representatives from various polling families meet in a neutral environment to address their shared interests.

The more optimistic Republicans say that if there’s a silver lining in the party’s 2012 setbacks, it’s that it has created a real openness among consultants – a famously territorial and ego-driven bunch – to work collaboratively at least for a little while.

Every major Republican polling outfit has been represented, including brand names such as the Tarrance Group, McLaughlin & Associates, American Viewpoint, North Star Opinion Research, OnMessage Inc. and Public Opinion Strategies, the firm that polled for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Former NRCC executive director Guy Harrison, who led the committee through 2012 and is now a consultant at OnMessage, has been an active participant in the meetings.

Republican pollster Jon McHenry, who co-founded North Star Opinion Research, said there’s a broad recognition within the GOP that pollsters need to rely less on gut instinct about voter turnout and more on hard data about the makeup of House districts.

In many cases, that’s going to require Republicans to work harder and spend more money to reach less-accessible areas of the electorate.

Sometimes that means taking polls over longer periods of time – three days instead of two or one. In other instances, it will mean experimenting with different polling schedules – collecting data on Saturdays, for instance, when younger and lower-income voters may be more responsive, but which Republicans have been loath to do in the past.

“It is much easier to get an old, white male on a land line. And the problem for Republicans is that reasonably defines a chunk of our base,” said McHenry, who has been present at several NRCC meetings. “If you weren’t looking at the entire [2012] electorate – if you were looking at, ‘oh, these are the people who are most likely to vote’ – you could convince yourself that Romney was going to win or, if you extend that to congressional campaigns, that you’re doing better than you are.”

Brock McCleary, the former NRCC polling director who now heads the robo-dial firm Harper Polling, emphasized that modeling districts accurately was the GOP’s greatest tactical challenge. Only the House committee is positioned to fix that problem on a large scale, he argued.

“The fundamental problem is that the modeling in the 2012 election was not accurate. It was not accurate for the media. It was not accurate for Republicans. In some cases, Democrats struggled as well,” said McCleary, another regular participant in the NRCC talks. “After 2010, when Democrats faced this problem, they were coming up on a presidential cycle with the most sophisticated data operation to sort that out for them. Republicans have no such instrument.”

Since the 2014 congressional map is essentially set – unlike last cycle, when redistricting left many states in flux until late in the cycle – Republicans have an opportunity to develop a common set of assumptions about turnout and then look for opportunities to shift the playing field in the GOP’s favor, strategists said.

“[Democrats] have gone onto step two in advance of Republicans, which is you actually try to change the electorate,” McCleary continued. “You get to modeling in the districts and then figure out where Republicans can change the turnout model 1 or 2 points in order to make a difference.”

The NRCC’s attempted polling turnaround is only one of the tactical post-mortems that Republicans have conducted in the aftermath of the 2012 campaign. The Republican National Committee has appointed an internal committee to assess the reasons for the party’s defeats last year, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee has brought in a new chairman and staff that have signaled they’ll take a different approach to primary elections and messaging.

But the NRCC effort may be the narrowest and most tangible effort so far to improve the GOP’s campaign machinery, and the one most likely to yield real results over the short term.

Democrats have not engaged in any comparable polling project on their side; party strategists say they were largely pleased with their polling in 2012 and don’t view incremental tactics as their challenge for 2014.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has, however, made a district-by-district assessment of what their candidates did right in 2012 and what they might have to do differently for the midterms, when the turnout environment and issue debates are likely to be different.

That analysis concluded in February, a DCCC official said.

One Democratic pollster said the view from that side was something like bewilderment at the GOP’s 2012 polling fiasco. Even when Democrats got routed in 2010, their pollsters weren’t caught by surprise as many Republicans were last year.

“I think they really believed that they were going to get a 2010-style electorate to come out,” the Democrat said. “I just don’t know what the excuse for that is. I don’t know what they do differently, other than look at the electorate accurately.”

For the pollsters involved in reassessing Republican House polling, capturing an accurate snapshot of the electorate is exactly the goal in mind. And regardless of the pollsters’ individual 2012 win-loss records, they’re treating that as a group objective for the moment.

None of the Republican vendors who agreed to speak for this story, on or off the record, indicated a resistance to participating in the NRCC process.

POS partner Robert Blizzard hailed the committee’s creation of a Strategy Department as a “tremendous” step forward, praising Rogers as the right choice to serve as point man for the operation.

“I think John is very smart, very talented – one of the best young minds they have over at the NRCC. He knows how to win campaigns,” Blizzard said.