New Online Voter Panel for Political Polling?

Research Now Group Inc, headquartered in Plano, TX, just launched a new voter panel. This panel allows political pollsters and new tool  to measure American voters’ perception about various issues. It provides insight on voters’  opinions of candidates, voter turnout, key campaign issues, and insights into the perceptions of millennials.

This panel gives researchers access to more than 600,000 deeply profiled, verified voters from every state. Researchers can pick constituents based on party affiliation, historical election turnout, and congressional district among other variables. Panelists can participate in surveys via varying platforms (mobile, tablet, or PC), so all voter populations will be represented.

Research Now has identified hundreds of thousands of voters who are historically hard-to-reach. This includes 70,000 millennials and other voters with no publicly available phone numbers.  This panel is the largest of its kind and marks a new step forward in polling. In recent years, polls have faced a lot of challenges. This is largely due to changes in phone use, caller ID, etc.. Many voters, especially millennials, do not use land-line telephones, so it is difficult to get accurate data. This new panel from Research Now provides a way to access this hard-to-reach population.

While this new panel is a step forward in polling, it is not necessarily the end point for polling improvement. In a previous blog post, I stated that the future of public opinion research lies in a variety of new methods. Social media analysis is one way to gain access to millennials and see their voting preferences, but it is also complicated and not always reliable. Biometrics technology can better understand voters’ tendencies and opinions. A combination of methods while using panels like the new Research Now panel will be key parts of the toolkit for public opinion researchers and it will be interesting to see what other technology emerges as the 2016 race for president continues.