Public Opinion Strategies

§1About

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

Public Opinion Strategies describes itself as a national political and public affairs research firm headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, with twelve partners leading its research.^1,2 A 2011 company release says Neil Newhouse, Bill McInturff and Glen Bolger founded the firm in 1991.³ Its website says it is a GP3 company; GP3 describes itself as a bipartisan communications and public affairs company, and according to MarTech360, private equity firm Seidler Equity Partners made a minority investment in GP3 in November 2022.^1,4,5

Kind

Works for one party^2,6

Founded

1991^1,3

§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.

Published with

Names its polls have been published under, alongside other pollsters or news outlets.

• Hart Research Associates/Public Opinion Strategies: Hart Research Associates · 32 polls listed
• GQR Research/Public Opinion Strategies: GQR

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.

Works for Republican candidates or groups. Its homepage calls it the largest Republican polling firm in the country, and its campaigns page lists only Republican officeholders among its political clients and mentions Democrats only as opponents its clients defeated.^2,6

• Republican Governors Association. The firm's homepage mentions its polling for the Republican Governors Association independent expenditure campaign.²
• Dave McCormick. The homepage says the firm was part of the McCormick for Senate campaign from its first day, and its campaigns page lists Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania as a client.^2,6
• John Thune. The firm's campaigns page lists Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota among its clients.⁶
• Steve Scalise. The firm's campaigns page lists House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana among its clients.⁶

Of its 31 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 1 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 2 by a Republican-aligned sponsor¹⁰.

Federal campaigns and committees that paid it

From 2023 through 2026, 60 federal committees reported paying Public Opinion Strategies $8,540,108 for polling, surveys or research^11,12,13,14. By the party each committee reports to the FEC: 0 Democratic, 51 Republican, 1 another party, and 8 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 once¹⁰. 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+0.6 (±1.5) across 12 polls of the generic ballot and 2026 races, in 2 contests.

Without a party-aligned sponsor

R+0.1 (±1.3) across 11 polls

Net approval: Donald Trump

+1.1 points (±1.1) across 12 polls, against other polls of the same question.

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^15,16: 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 current managing partner or chief executive is named on the about pages read.
• No start date was found for the CNBC All-America Economic Survey arrangement, and the NBC News Poll page does not say when The Wall Street Journal stopped co-sponsoring that poll.
• GP3's ownership share in the firm was not found; the 2022 GP3 announcement on Business Wire returned HTTP 403, and the MarTech360 copy does not name Public Opinion Strategies.
• The pages read describe corporate and public affairs clients only by type, so no standing non-news clients are recorded.
• No outside fieldwork or panel vendor is named in the releases read.
• Sponsors seen on its polls in our data (among them Senate Majority PAC, CoinDesk, Paragon Health Institute and More Perfect) were not checked against their releases, so none is recorded as a relationship.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling or filing, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction by the firm.