Establishment Republican news outlets and talking heads have been gloating about a 500-person poll that puts Florida Governor Ron DeSantis a few points ahead of President Joe Biden in Arizona and Pennsylvania, while claiming Donald Trump would lose to the incumbent in the same scenario. The problem, besides the sample size and lack of cross tabs released, is the so-called “pollster” and its relationship with leading Trump antagonists such as Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Karl Rove, and even billionaire progressive George Soros.
Public Opinion Strategies.
Founded in 1991 and run out of Alexandria, Virginia – a 15-minute trip into Washington, D.C. – Public Opinion Strategies or ‘POS’ appears to be part of a wider conglomerate known as ‘GP3’. The firm is almost entirely staffed by ‘Republican in Name Only’ (RINO) hardliners, including its founders Neil Newhouse, Bill McInturff, and Glen Bolger.
The firm’s first major races, in 1992, were that of hyper-establishment candidate Senator Arlen Specter, as well as Senator and failed presidential candidate John McCain. The firm boasts on its social media presence of Jeb Bush’s political career, as well as admitting to having worked on Mitt Romney’s campaign prior to 2012.
“The firm was part of the Bush-Cheney ’04 polling team,” their own documents suggest, adding that they went to work on John McCain’s losing effort against Barack Obama in 2008. Newhouse even did polling work for Jeb Bush’s aborted 2016 campaign against Donald Trump, and was the lead pollster for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign failure.
Newhouse’s biography details his work for big pharmaceutical organizations such as Procter and Gamble, PhRMA, the American Medical Association, and even The Gates Foundation. He has also worked for Google and Stanford University, as well as for four Presidential campaigns – “Senator Bob Dole, President George W. Bush, Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and he was the lead pollster for Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.”
More recently, the firm has been reliant on Karl Rove’s “American Crossroads” organization, as well as Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund, and even Ronna McDaniel’s Republican National Committee to pay the bills.
NMB Research.
The firm appears to have sometimes masqueraded as “NMB Research” – presumably named for its founders Newhouse, McInturff, and Bolger. Virginia records show NMB incorporated as a Limited Liability Corporation which sits next door to POS’s N Fayette street address in Alexandria.
The subject was broached by a 2012 NBC investigation which found that a “pro-Romney super pac, Restore Our Future, show[ed] five payments totaling $449,000 last month for ‘survey research’ to a company called NMB Research, listed at 206 N. Fayette Street, in Alexandria. This is on top of five previous payments to the same firm of $354.500.”
“An NBC researcher who visited the address found a sign instructing that all mail and packages for the offices of NMB Research be delivered next door at 214 N. Fayette, the street address of Public Opinion Strategies.”
The subject was raised because “[f]ederal election laws bar campaign and so-called ‘independent expenditure’ groups such as super pacs – which are unfettered by limits on campaign contributions– from ‘coordinating’ their operations, including sharing their polling results.”
The POS/NMB response was risible at best: “Public Opinion Strategies partner McInturff confirmed that he and Newhouse are both partners in NMB Research—an entirely permissible arrangement, he said, so long as the two polling entities do not share the data they collect for their respective clients.”
GP3.
Today, POS appears to be part of a larger corporate structure with offices across the United States. Known simply ‘GP3’, some of the founders and staff have been less than shy about their views on the 2024 presidential race, if their social media is anything to go by.
In fact, one of the top GP3 partners, Phil Cox, “serves on the Board of the Senate Leadership Fund and WinRed, the GOP’s small-dollar fundraising platform,” raising a serious conflict of interest when you consider that Cox is named as a “senior advisor” to Governor Ron DeSantis for his gubernatorial campaigns.
GP3 appears to be part of a major private equity foray into Republican politics, as the Washington Post reported in November 2022:
On Feb 18th 2023, co-founder Glen Bolger responded to a pro-Trump Twitter account by posting a picture of Joe and Jill Biden with the caption: “Good morning everyone! Here’s a sweet picture of Donald Trump’s daddy and mommy to start your day.”
The theme is prevalent across Bolger’s social media feed, where he appears to stalk young ‘MAGA influencers’ and reply to their pro-Trump tweets with typical globalist invective, calling Trump an “election denier,” a “loser,” and a “cancer”.
Swamp Polling.
A 2006 consultant profile of POS revealed the firm using “distortions, exaggerations, misrepresentations or innuendo.”
The Center for Public Integrity revealed:
A 1997 Florida law requires pollsters to disclose who is sponsoring the call. The law presumes that telephone campaigns of fewer than 1,000 calls lasting longer than two minutes are legitimate polls. For the poll in question, Public Opinion Strategies made 300 calls lasting four to six minutes, but included, commission staff reported, statements that “appear to have been distortions, exaggerations, misrepresentations or innuendo.”
Upon review, however, the commission found that the questions in the poll were “efforts to seek information from voters for use in tabulating the voters’ reactions to certain statements,” and cleared the party in 2000.
In 2004, the Public Opinion Strategies’ poll of 300 likely voters in Georgia for congressional candidate Lynn Westmoreland drew fire from his opponent in the Republican primary, Dylan Glenn. The poll included questions highlighting Glenn’s race (African-American) and marital status (single) and comparing them to those of Westmoreland (white and married).
While scarcely novel, POS’s half-hidden links with NMB, as well as its connections with a Soros-linked CEO, Paul Ryan and Seidler, its status with RINO candidates and campaigns, as well as its staff’s own social media profiles make for one extremely doubtful independent polling organization.
Against this backdrop, their findings that DeSantis leads Biden in Pennsylvania while Trump lags behind are highly dubious. The same goes for their findings in Arizona, where they claim DeSantis leads Biden 48 to 42, while Trump trails 44 to 45. Even taking their numbers at face value, the 500-person poll’s margin of error is 4.4 percentage points. Meaning the results being trumpeted by establishment websites like RedState and McClatchy are possibly even totally upside down.
