JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Remington Research Group (RRG), a Missouri-based group, was rated as a top five Republican polling firm by The New York Times’ pollster ratings last week.
“Remington Research Group has always held itself to the highest standards while still providing a cost-effective political polling solution,” President Titus Bond said in a statement. “It’s a credit to our entire team, and we will continue to innovate every day.”
Founded in 2015 by Axiom Strategies, RRG was the first polling group in America to use text messaging as a component of its surveys, according to Bond.
“Now text messaging is industry standard. In-person interviews will begin to increase and social media interactions will begin to be more widely utilized,” Bond told The Missouri Times.
Polling firms nationwide are currently grappling with inaccuracies and out-dated survey measures that came to light during the 2016 and 2020 elections. RRG, however, worked early on to develop innovative polling methods in order to stay ahead of the curve and deliver accurate polls to their clients at a low cost, Bond said.
“Political polling firms always need to adjust. Just speaking for RRG, we have invested internally into developing new methodologies,” Bond said. “We test new ways to reach a harder to reach [the] electorate. The cure can’t just be calling cell phones. A live call is different than a text; an interview on social media is different than an online interview; someone knocking on your door is different than an IVR [interactive voice response]. They are all different approaches, but they all need to be explored constantly.”
In Missouri, no public polls taken during the 2020 election cycle accurately predicted the share of votes that former President Donald Trump and Gov. Mike Parson would win in the state. While many polls aggregated by FiveThirtyEight predicted Parson would win by between two and eight percentage points, he actually prevailed by just under 17 percentage points. While polls predicted Trump would beat now-President Joe Biden by an average of eight points, he actually won the state by more than 15 percentage points. This trend continued throughout the rest of the country with polling firms of all calibers.
Pollsters, including those at RRG, are now tasked with finding ways to innovate their methods to improve accuracy while maintaining an affordable service for their clients.
“Political polling is difficult. As pollsters, we advise our clients on how and where to spend their campaign budget. The entire campaign strategy comes down to the data we provide,” Bond said. “That data needs to be accurate, but it also needs to be affordable so campaigns are able to adjust quickly if needed.”
Public Opinion Strategies, Trafalgar Group, and Landmark Communications all received an “A” grade, while Remington, Tarrance Group, and Cygnal all received a “B” grade, according to The New York Times rating.