Pulse Decision Science

PulseDS is proud to announce that we have won 5 2026 American Association of Political Consultants Pollie Awards: Polling for US House (Gold) Polling for US Senate (Silver), Polling for Advocacy (Bronze) Best Use of Analytics (Gold & Silver) Congratulations to all the winners!

Turns out 98% of Dem Ballot voters voted in a recent general election. These aren't new voters; they are habitual voters who finally have a primary worth voting in. Of these "new" primary voters, 91% of the Dems and 93% of GOP voted in a recent general. Pretty similar. 4/4

Democrats only have a third of the congressional seats to Republicans’ two-thirds, and hold no statewide offices. Republicans actually had a Presidential Primary, and have generally had more meaningful primary opportunities for voters to take part in the process. 3/4

Them: Texas Democrat primary turnout is looking huge, this is a sign for the general! The Pulse: Hold your horses, we're not so sure about that. 1/4

Attorney General @KrisKobach1787 of the Great state of Kansas opens up the 2026 race with a strong, 10-point lead over his likely Democratic challenger, Chris Mann.

Fact check: True! Nobody does Jewish voter outreach and turnout like @RJC—delivering an historic share of the Jewish vote for @POTUS in 2024. And recognized for our cutting-edge data modeling and targeting with @PulseDecision. 💪🏻🇺🇸

ICYMI: RJC's successful efforts to get out the Jewish vote for President Donald Trump and Republicans in key battleground states in 2024 was based on the most sophisticated data modeling and Jewish voter microtargeting ever developed. Alongside @PulseDecision, RJC is proud to win the 2025 Reed Award for "Best Use of Data Analytics/Machine Learning in Field Program". campaignsandelections.com/awards/reed-aw… See more from 2024: action.rjchq.org/wp-content/upl…

NEW: RJC/@WPAIntel Release 2024 Jewish Vote Results Analysis – A Large Shift to President Donald J. Trump and the GOP President Donald J. Trump received a historic share of the Jewish vote in 2024, and the election results prove it. From coast to coast, Jewish communities across America moved significantly to the GOP. In New York City, President Trump overwhelmingly won precincts with 25%+ Jewish voters. Palm Beach County, Florida moved 13% to President Trump. Nassau County, New York moved 14% to President Trump. The most Jewish precincts in Michigan moved by 16% to President Trump. The list goes on and on. But don't just take our word for it: review the cold, hard numbers, and you're left with the indisputable fact that President Trump continued to make significant inroads with the American Jewish community in 2024. The RJC, having spent $15MM on the largest Jewish outreach campaign ever, is gratified to have played a significant role in this historic election for the American Jewish community. rjchq.org/2024_jewish_vo…

Pollster Type 3: A special place in our contempt is reserved for the pollsters who just refused to take a position and tortured their data to show every single competitive state (and a few non-competitive ones) a one-point race or a tie. We’re not even sure why they bother.

Pollster Type 2: Those who stubbornly refused to do the things that most ( not all) campaign pollsters did and continued to not weight on education and/or not make partisan non-response adjustments to their polls, including on past election recall. These pollsters, many of them well-known, looked foolish last night. If these pollsters want to continue to stubbornly make the theoretical argument that these non-response adjustments are wrong, they really owe it to their editors/sponsors/just the public in general to propose some alternate method of fixing their issues. Because they’ve not been wrong for three consecutive Presidential elections, in the exact same direction, and for the exact same predictable reasons.

Alright, we got some sleep. Time to talk about the polling. There really seem to have been three types of polls and pollsters this year:

Pollster Type 1: Those who learned the lessons of 2016 and 2020, made sensible methodological adjustments and more or less got things right. (hey, that's us)!

Kamala Harris is no Scranton Joe. Joe Biden, in his current diminished state, wouldn’t have won this election. But Kamala Harris couldn’t hold onto some key parts of Biden’s coalition. Biden won the union vote in 2020 by 16 points. Harris won it this year by just 10 and we suspect that if you excluded public sector union members, the shift would have been even more stark. Trump beat Biden among white Catholics by just 12 points in 2020. He beat Harris by 23. This shift played out in key places like Erie and Bucks counties in Pennsylvania, both of which flipped from narrow Biden wins to narrow Trump wins.

The exit polls don’t suggest that Harris did worse among black voters, her margins are the same as Biden’s, but Black turnout, which was down in the early vote, continued to underperform.

Kamala Harris had an African American vote problem and an urban problem. One of the first warning signs for Harris was a Trump win in heavily Black Baldwin County, Georgia. After going for both Clinton and Biden by nearly two points in 2016 and 2020, it swung to a two-point Trump win this year. That kind of small, but meaningful shift would show up across the country.  As of this moment, with votes still being counted, Harris is winning places like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit by five to ten points less Joe Biden did four years ago.

In fact, it is important to note that we are looking at a major shift – the GOP is moving toward having a more diverse coalition than the Democratic party. The Democrats are increasingly dependent on only two demographics: college-educated white women and urban African-Americans.

We did a lot of Hispanic focus groups this year and the story we heard over and over again was that the Biden-Harris immigration policies were bringing crime and danger into their communities and that the Biden-Harris economy was failing them. Democrats countered this with “Latinx,” “representation,” and accusations of racism. Those may have played well in ethnic studies departments and with the punditry, but they fell flat with real voters leading real lives.