Election predictions

The Polls Are All Wrong. A Startup Called Civis Is Our Best Hope to Fix Them

Traditionally, the most efficient way for a campaign to gather strategic intelligence on a slice of the electorate has been to conduct its own internal polls, effectively using the same methods public pollsters use. But those don’t really work anymore. Bad internal polling convinced Romney’s team right up until Election Day that the former Massa­chusetts governor was on a path to victory.

Today, campaigns realize they have to look elsewhere for their intelligence, which has caused a major change in how the political industry functions. In the past, an entire campaign’s data and infrastructure would go poof after Election Day. Now Civis and similar firms are building institutional memory with permanent information store­houses that track America’s 220 million–odd voters across their adult lives, noting everything from magazine subscriptions and student loans to voting history, marital status, Facebook ID, and Twitter handle. Power and clients flow to the firms that can build and maintain the best databases of people’s behavior over time.