New GOP polling firm goal: Catch up with Democrats

Washington, Dec. 20 (ANI): 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 firm Harper Polling, is launching 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'.

According to Politico, for several cycles now, Democrats have benefited from a high-volume, relatively inexpensive flow of survey data from the company Public Policy Polling.

Some of those surveys are released to the public, while others are conducted for private purposes by Democratic campaigns and interest groups.

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.

According to the report, 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.

"The technology is very affordable and very nimble. Having fast, precise polling was very useful for us," he said, adding: "This is what PPP is and there's really no competitor."

"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?" he added. (ANI)