Morning Consult

• 1. Introduction

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  Morning Consult is an American business intelligence company with offices in Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco. It builds online survey research tools, data services, and news for people working in business, marketing, economics, and politics. The company was established in 2014, though its very first poll appeared a year earlier. That poll asked whether young, uninsured Americans planned to enroll through the Affordable Care Act's new insurance exchanges. Morning Consult released the results just before those exchanges opened in 2013.

  A single poll about a health law rollout does not obviously lead to newsroom partnerships, multi-million dollar funding rounds, and mentions inside emergency government meetings. Yet that is where Morning Consult ended up. How did a young survey operation earn a regular slot inside political journalism? Why does its own election-calling record include a well-documented miss? And what made its economic data worth citing during a national crisis?

• 2. The Politico Partnership

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  In 2015, Morning Consult published a report describing a "Shy Trump" voter inside the Republican presidential primaries. That claim has since been challenged.

  In June 2016, Morning Consult began polling with Bloomberg News on investor sentiment. That same election year, Morning Consult and Politico launched a weekly polling partnership. The two companies said it would cover "political issues, personalities and media aspects that affect the daily debate." The partnership continued after the 2016 election and still appears weekly in Politico Playbook.

  Morning Consult also conducts regular survey research with The New York Times. Its own numbers for the 2016 presidential race showed a tighter contest than most other pollsters found.

• 3. A Mixed Record

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  Morning Consult relies on a nonprobability sampling process, drawing on multiple nationally recognized vendors to reach tens of millions of Americans. After fielding a survey, the company applies weights based on age, race and ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, and region. Those regional weights are pinned to the 2016 Current Population Survey.

  During the 2016 presidential election, Morning Consult called the eventual winner incorrectly. It projected Hillary Clinton would win the national popular vote by 3 percent. She won it by 2.1 percent instead.

  In the 2018 and 2022 US midterm elections, Morning Consult performed well below average. Its errors ran larger than most other pollsters' in both cycles. Despite that spotty record, Morning Consult kept building tools to track approval instead of just elections.

• 4. Tracking Approval Ratings

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  Morning Consult regularly surveys public approval of the leaders of major world economies.

  In October 2017, data from the company's Brand Intelligence work turned up in The New York Times. It tracked how the NFL's brand image shifted right after President Donald Trump criticized the league on Twitter. Numbers like that kept drawing outside attention, including from investors.

• 5. Money Behind the Growth

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  In May 2020, Morning Consult closed a $31 million Series A funding round. The money came from investors including James Murdoch's Lupa Systems and Advance Venture Partners, among others. That round valued the company at $306 million.

  In June 2021, Morning Consult raised a $60 million Series B round led by Advance Venture Partners. Susquehanna Growth Equity and Lupa Systems also joined as investors. After that round closed, Morning Consult was valued at over $1.01 billion.

  Some of that new backing arrived just as one of the company's other products, Economic Intelligence, was about to be tested by an unprecedented shock to the economy.

• 6. Reading the Economy

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  Morning Consult launched its Economic Intelligence product in the fall of 2019. By the spring of 2020, it was picking up a dip in consumer confidence as the coronavirus outbreak continued.

  The Federal Reserve cited that data during an emergency meeting on the 15th of March 2020. A single spring reading on consumer confidence has kept turning up in national coverage ever since, cited by outlets from The Associated Press to The Wall Street Journal to The Washington Post.