Mitchell Research & Communications

§1About

✎ Drafted by AI from the public sources cited. Each sentence links to its source.

Mitchell Research & Communications, Inc. is a polling and consulting firm in Lansing, Michigan whose team page names Steve Mitchell as president and chief executive and Suzie Mitchell as chief operating officer.¹ The page says Steve Mitchell founded the company after working on the national staff of the Reagan-Bush 1984 campaign, and that Justin Clement leads the firm's lobbying arm, Mitchell-Clement Legislative Affairs.¹ Its November 2025 poll for MIRS reached voters by text messages linking to a SurveyMonkey poll plus online panels, and its July 2026 release reported a statewide survey of 672 likely voters.^2,3

Kind

Commercial firm¹

§2Who it works with

Why this matters: Owners, news partners and the firms behind a poll's interviews shape what gets asked, how, and what gets published.

Who paid for its polls

§3Whom it works for

Why this matters: A firm that also works for one party's campaigns can still publish accurate polls, but readers deserve to know.

Doesn’t say whom it works for. The Mitchell team page does not say whether the firm works for one party; it lists governors, U.S. senators, members of Congress, legislators and local governments among political clients without naming them, and says Steve Mitchell worked on the national staff of the Reagan-Bush 1984 campaign before founding the firm.¹

Of its 13 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁵.

Federal campaigns and committees that paid it

From 2023 through 2026, 1 federal committee reported paying Mitchell Research & Communications $7,500 for polling, surveys or research^6,7,8,9. By the party each committee reports to the FEC: 0 Democratic, 0 Republican, and 1 none (most PACs and super PACs report none).

§4How its numbers compare with other polls

Why this matters: A firm whose polls run steadily to one side of everyone else's is worth reading alongside others.

Each of its polls since the 2024 election is compared with other pollsters' polls of the same question whose field period ended within 14 days, each other pollster counted once⁵. The figure is the average gap, with a 95% margin. This compares it with other polls, not with the truth: the others can be the ones that are off.

Party margin

R+0.7 (±2.6) across 5 polls of the generic ballot and 2026 races, in 2 contests.

D+ means its polls showed Democrats doing better than other polls did; R+, Republicans. A figure from fewer than 5 polls isn't shown.

§5Record against results

Why this matters: The one test that doesn't depend on other polls: how close a firm's final polls came to what voters did.

From FiveThirtyEight's final public data^10,11: general-election polls between a Democrat and a Republican in the last three weeks before each election, compared with the certified result. FiveThirtyEight rated each name polls were published under separately. Across all 8,957 such polls, the average miss was D+0.7, so the relative figure takes out the misses every pollster shared that year.

ABC News closed FiveThirtyEight in March 2025; its data stops at the 2022 elections. 2026 results will be added once states certify them.

§6Its polls

§7What we looked for and didn't find

• No founding year was found.
• No start or end dates were found for the MIRS arrangement; MIRS pages describing it returned not found.
• No panel vendor is named beyond the SurveyMonkey survey platform.
• Reports that MIRS declined to run a June 2026 Mitchell poll the firm then released itself, and that Mitchell reweighted a late-October 2024 Michigan poll, were found only in news coverage and a forum thread and are listed as pointers, not findings.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.