politics

Why is internal campaign polling considered more accurate? What are they doing differently?

Internal polling is not more accurate. It’s just highly paid consultants saying that their polls are more accurate which campaigns tend to agree with because they are paying the consultants tons of money and it would be an admission of ineptitude otherwise. Caveat being if their internal pollster has some insight or methodology that the 3rd party polls are blatantly missing or ignoring. Even then though the internal Svengali is often wrong. 

Post election “our internal polls had us leading” is such a common refrain from losing candidates.

Internal pollsters generally are used more for targeting issues and voters, testing messages, then they are for the down to the wire horse race. 

In 1996 for example when I was working on economic policy for Clinton, we were out every week testing new policies and messaging for such policies once we found voter passion for them. Internal polls also helped us identify and target “hockeymoms” with wedge policies that won over suburban upper middle class women.