Beyond Polling: How a Robust Research Program Can Be a Difference Maker in ’26
There’s a variation of an old riddle that political marketers must answer each cycle. It goes like this: Almost everyone needs it, asks for it, and some people can do it, but almost nobody really uses it. What is it?
Research is the answer for most campaign professionals.
Sure, polling remains securely lined into most budgets, but ad testing and other forms of market research common in the commercial world remain under used by political marketers.
Allen Porter thinks he can convince practitioners to see the light when it comes to research — or at least see the strategic benefit. As general manager at Enghouse Insights, which offers a comprehensive multi-mode survey management platform, he’s on a mission to share how leveraging the right data and research can be the difference maker for campaigns in 2026.
There’s a variation of an old riddle that political marketers must answer each cycle. It goes like this: Almost everyone needs it, asks for it, and some people can do it, but almost nobody really uses it. What is it?
Research is the answer for most campaign professionals.
Sure, polling remains securely lined into most budgets, but ad testing and other forms of market research common in the commercial world remain under used by political marketers. Allen Porter thinks he can convince practitioners to see the light when it comes to research — or at least see the strategic benefit. As general manager at Enghouse Insights, which offers a comprehensive multi-mode survey management platform, he’s on a mission to share how leveraging the right data and research can be the difference maker for campaigns in 2026.
C&E: How should practitioners be thinking about research this cycle?
Porter: Most people are focused on the horse race or doing some name recognition type of research. But they’re not really thinking about it in a broader scope. Research can actually help in crafting your message or to test your collateral. In a close race, you can’t rely just on gut feeling. There’s something that we refer to as confirmation bias. You start to hear what you want to hear.
C&E: How does confirmation bias appear for campaign practitioners?
Porter: When it comes to testing, say, a mail piece or even a TV ad, some practitioners will just put it out there on the campaign’s social media channels to see how people react. They’re moving so fast, they don’t believe they have time to do anything more sophisticated. They just kind of watch and see how effective it is. The problem with that approach is, what metrics are you using to evaluate the creative? Engagement metrics can get skewed for various reasons, including platform algorithms, audience composition and automated traffic. In fact, data shows that more than 50 percent of internet traffic is bots. High engagement doesn’t necessarily mean a message is persuasive with voters.
So you’ve got this piece of creative on a social media platform and because it’s political the algorithms could be either magnifying it for certain audiences or suppressing it. Same thing with email. Email has got a whole other set of related issues.
C&E: Tell us about those issues.
Porter: It used to be fairly easy to tell if an email was opened or not. That’s not true anymore. With many email providers — especially if you have someone’s company email — there’s a screening process that checks out all the links to make sure it’s not a phishing attack. That messes with the backend metrics because now a lot of those sends look like they’ve been opened even if they didn’t get through the screener. It also used to be that people would put in hidden images, like a one pixel. There are all sorts of tools now to scrape those out.
C&E: Can’t you just bundle a creative test into a larger poll to save money and time?
Porter: You need to be careful in the design of that survey — especially if you’re doing message testing. Research works best when the design minimizes opportunities for bias. In some studies that means keeping interviewers blind to the sponsor or candidate to mitigate interviewer bias.
If the interviewer knows they’re doing this for candidate X, then they may, even unintentionally, emphasize their name when they’re reading the question or whatever it is. You need to do it as blind as possible to try to eliminate some of those biases. There’s also a difference between the methodologies. If you’re doing a phone-based survey, then it gets a little bit trickier if you’re trying to do something like a visual ad test. You also want to think about length and frequency of surveying a person; these factors can lead to respondent fatigue and data quality issues.
C&E: What differentiates Enghouse Insights from other shops?
Porter: What differentiates us is the breadth of what you can do within one platform. Yes, you can conduct traditional polling using live interviewers, automated phone surveys, IVR, web, email or a combination of channels. But it goes far beyond collecting voter opinions.
We can identify supporters and persuadable voters, test ballot language and campaign messages, measure reactions to debates, speeches, videos or advertising, track changes in sentiment over time, and quickly adjust their strategy while a campaign is still moving. Our partners can also use the platform for constituent hotlines, donor research, fundraising outreach, event registration, volunteer coordination, and get-out-the-vote initiatives.
The real differentiator isn’t simply that we offer phone, IVR, and online research. It’s that we provide flexible campaign intelligence and engagement infrastructure that can support the entire election cycle, from understanding voters to mobilizing them. Because the different modes and activities are connected, one can begin with research, segment people based on their responses, continue engaging them through the most appropriate channel and maintain that history over time.
C&E: What about respondent bias? People deliberately trying to game a poll’s results. How do you account for that?
Porter: Mixing the methodologies can help mitigate that. Maybe you reach out to some people through a web survey, and then you also supplement that with phone surveys because phone surveys are more expensive. You can use outbound live agents to recruit the person, get them to say, ‘I’ll take your survey,’ and then transfer them into an IVR. That removes the sense of, ‘Oh, I gotta give an answer that they want to hear.’ And that actually gets to better quality results. Last cycle, some pollsters using that methodology produced notably accurate results.
C&E: When should campaigns invest in research?
Porter: I would say at the point where you’ve established an exploratory committee. Clients can come to us to help craft their message. If the candidate believes in items A, B, and C, and no one cares about item A, then why are you talking about it? That’s not going to move the needle. So we can help shape your platform and messaging priorities from the start. Email me to get started.
