WPA Intelligence

§1About

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

WPA Intelligence is a polling and data firm; a questionnaire it prepared for the Club for Growth in January 2025 gives its address as 324 Second Street SE in Washington, D.C.^1,2 A Columbia University School of Professional Studies speaker biography names Chris Wilson as chief executive of WPA Intelligence and says he started the firm in 2004 after serving as global director of research for Weber Shandwick International.² The same biography says Wilson directed survey research and predictive analytics for Glenn Youngkin's 2021 campaign for governor of Virginia, work it says earned him the American Association of Political Consultants' Pollster of the Year award, and was data director for Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting Ron DeSantis, in 2023 and 2024.²

Kind

Commercial firm^1,2

Founded

2004²

§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.

Works for Republican candidates or groups. The firm's own website could not be read, so this rests on the clients named in its chief executive's Columbia speaker biography: the Republican National Committee, the NRSC, the NRCC, the 2016 Cruz for President campaign and Glenn Youngkin's 2021 campaign for governor, along with the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the Family Research Council. No Democratic campaign or committee is named in the sources read.²

• Republican National Committee. The Columbia biography lists the Republican National Committee among the organizations Wilson and WPA Intelligence work with.²
• National Republican Senatorial Committee. The Columbia biography lists the NRSC among the organizations Wilson and WPA Intelligence work with.²
• National Republican Congressional Committee. The Columbia biography lists the NRCC among the organizations Wilson and WPA Intelligence work with.²
• Cruz for President (2016) (2016–2016). The Columbia biography says Wilson was director of research, analytics and digital strategy for the 2016 Cruz for President campaign.²
• Glenn Youngkin for Governor (2021) (2021–2021). The Columbia biography says Wilson directed survey research and predictive analytics for Glenn Youngkin's 2021 campaign for governor of Virginia.²

Of its 1 poll listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 1 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁵.

Federal campaigns and committees that paid it

From 2023 through 2026, 29 federal committees reported paying WPA Intelligence $9,980,284 for polling, surveys or research^6,7,8,9. By the party each committee reports to the FEC: 0 Democratic, 18 Republican, and 11 none (most PACs and super PACs report none).

§4Record 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.

§5Its polls

§6What we looked for and didn't find

• Its website, wpaintel.com, redirected on 2026-11-06 to a placeholder page for Pulse Decision Science that does not mention WPA; archived copies of its pages were refused by the Wayback Machine's bot block, and a 2017 Medium post announcing its change of name from WPA Opinion Research to WPA Intelligence returned HTTP 403. The firm's own description, team and client list were therefore not read, and whether it was renamed, sold or closed was not established.
• Founded rests on the Columbia biography (2004); a 2017 court complaint listed under pointers says WPA has provided research services since 1998.
• No standing news partners, co-pollsters or fieldwork vendors were found; its Club for Growth memos describe live telephone interviews but name no call center.
• The sample release, a Politico article, refused automated requests and was not read.
• Searches found a November 2017 federal class action complaint under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, Mey v. WPA Intelligence (D.D.C. No. 1:17-cv-02350), listed under pointers; its outcome was not found because CourtListener refused automated requests, so no court finding is recorded.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, regulator action or retraction concerning the firm; aggregator statements about excluding or reweighting its polls are gathered in a separate sweep and were not searched here.