For cycles now, Democrats have benefited from a high, volume, relatively inexpensive flow of survey data from the company Public Policy Polling (PPP). PPP takes hundreds of polls in any given cycle to examine individual races and national issue debates. Some data is released to the public, while others are conducted for private purposes by Democratic campaigns and interest groups.On the Republican side, candidates have long used live telephone interviews, which were shown to not only be more expensive, but also inaccurate in many cases during the recent presidential election.

But the Republican polling community has some major changes in store. A new Republican polling firm, Harper Polling, has been established to help the party make a comeback with a fresh stream of data on the state of the electorate. The outfit's goal will be to put the Republican party on parity with Democrats in the field of IVR polling-- a term that means interactive voice response polling. Read More