Major Democratic polling firm expands before midterm election

A leading Democratic public opinion research company with a client list spanning from the New Georgia Project to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced a major staff expansion ahead of November’s midterm elections and beyond.

Founded by Terrance Woodbury and Roshni Nedungadi in 2019, HIT Strategies is one of the fastest-growing firms of its kind. Their most recent expansion includes new hires from other agencies including Change Research and Equis Research, and the additions have built their team to nearly 40 full-time staffers, including communications, data and sales teams.

“We’re able to do so much more than we would if we were just a traditional, purely research shop,” Nedungadi said.

Woodbury said that as someone who worked on both the canvassing and campaign sides of elections, he noticed politicians repeatedly deferred their decisions to polling — but most of the people conducting those surveys tended to be white.

This lack of diversity led to shortsighted mistakes from Democrats, he said. In 2016, he and Nedungadi noticed there a growing number of young people disillusioned with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton who were willing to vote for a third-party candidate instead.

“The more we rang the alarm, the more we had Democratic leadership tell us that young people would not wait in line and waste their vote by voting third party,” Woodbury said. After analyzing the slim margins in battleground states where Clinton potentially lost out to third-party voters, “that is where the defeat happened. It was exactly what we were perceiving — and nobody was listening.”

The firm wants to use its bigger footprint to pursue the goal of demystifying diverse audiences for clients by publicizing more data and giving more open access to voter trends, Nedungadi said.

“We found a lot of times, when we were speaking to potential clients or part of the political establishment, they would say, ‘It’s so hard to reach audiences like younger voters or AAPI voters,’” Nedungadi said, adding that those barriers became excuses to not reach out to new communities.

HIT’s staffing — which is 48 percent white, 19 percent Black and 13 percent Latino, according to Woodbury — reflects the Democratic Party fairly well, the founders said. That helps the organization craft more nuanced polling questions and improve methodology.

One example is a 2020 poll HIT conducted that compared voting enthusiasm with perceptions of political power to answer the question, “No matter how often you vote, how much power do you think your vote has to make a difference?” Nedungadi said. HIT found that the correlation between feeling one’s vote has power and turning out to vote was “almost direct” — a key insight to understanding turnout among Black and young voters, she said.

The DCCC has been working with HIT following a review of its polling firms in the 2020 election, said Dennis Raj, the DCCC’s deputy executive director of analytics. The firm has been helping the committee improve surveys of Asian American and Black voters, reevaluate the cultural competency of its own polls and shape messaging for white voters as well, Raj said.

“Part of the value of having HIT on board is they’re able to help us with both — make sure we’re asking the right questions or teasing out the right concerns among communities of color, but also helping us think through the other, larger-scale piece,” Raj said. “We get to … have them help us think across the entire map.”

Beyond assisting institutions like the DCCC, Woodbury noted EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Council as equally important clients to the agency. By embedding themselves in large interest groups outside of the official Democratic Party, he said, HIT can gather and present more context around what marginalized communities consider priorities.

Looking forward, the team wants to expand polling on young female voters, as well as men of color, whose Republican vote share has increased in recent years — specific subgroups that haven’t been considered key parts of typical voter models in the past, the founders said.

“Our messaging doesn’t try to improve the way that Black voters or young voters feel about Democrats or policy. It’s to improve their perception of their own power and how they use that power to not only elect Democrats but then to hold them accountable,” Woodbury said.