Internal Campaign Polling
How campaigns use private polls to make strategic decisions, why internal polls differ from public polls, and the risk of self-deception.
Polls for Decision-Making
Internal campaign polls serve a fundamentally different purpose than public polls. Public polls ask 'who is winning?' Internal polls ask 'what should we do?' They test messages, identify voter segments, track the effectiveness of advertising, and measure the impact of campaign events.
A typical internal poll battery includes the standard vote question plus dozens of additional items: favorability of both candidates on specific traits (honest, strong, cares about people like me), reactions to tested messages and attack lines, issue priorities, and sometimes experimental questions that show respondents ads or news clips and measure the response. This data drives resource allocation: which states to invest in, which messages to use in ads, and which voter segments to target.