Solving Iowa’s Caucus Polling Challenges

There’s been some grumbling lately among Republican Presidential campaigns about the accuracy — or lack thereof — in Iowa caucus polling.

The root of the problem is that public pollsters are using survey samples that are built using “likely voter” screens rather than data from lists of actual caucus-goers. This matters because, historically, 80% of caucus-goers have attended a previous caucus. Those lists are owned by the Iowa Republican and Democrat parties individually and are not publicly available.

On the other hand, most of the Presidential campaigns have, at great expense, purchased the full caucus list from the parties. They’ve used it to build their polling samples and digitized it to target caucus-goers online.

That approach is generally cost-prohibitive for one-off uses like a public opinion poll. This September column by Democrat pollster Mark Mellman explained the problem well.

Thanks to a new partnership between the Republican Party of Iowa and Data Trust, a firm that provides voter and consumer data to center-right organizations, there’s a solution to this problem for those polling the Iowa Republican Presidential Caucus.

Data Trust is now the exclusive broker of the Iowa GOP Caucus list and has built a limited number of polling samples which are available for sale to pollsters and research groups. Instead of being solely reliant on the “likely voter” screen, researchers have access to samples that include known caucus-goers — a big change from the past.

In addition to polling samples, Data Trust has onboarded the caucus list to make it available for online ad targeting. It will be available from a range of major ad partners.

Ad Age recently profiled this exclusive partnership writing, “the Iowa state GOP has made its voter data more accessible to campaigns and pollsters that don’t need the full set of GOP voter data or have found it cost-prohibitive to buy all of it.”

With less than three months left until the Iowa Republican Caucus, this partnership opens new doors for anyone wanting to poll the Iowa caucus or advertise online to caucus-goers.