“Just because there’s a scandal doesn’t mean you’ve won,” said Republican pollster David Winston, pointing to 1998, when Republicans lost House seats despite President Clinton’s self-inflicted woes. “The other side is embroiled in putting out fires. It presents a clear opportunity to define the policy debate — the question is, what do you do with that opportunity?”

To read the full article, turn to washingtonexaminer.com.

As GOP pollster David Winston points out, “What people want to hear is a credible plan for fixing the economy and creating jobs.”

To read more of the op-ed, turn to latimes.com.

The idea that polls taken 18 months before the midterm elections could reliably tell us much of anything about where the electorate will be next November is almost a farce. Just one-twelfth of Obama’s second term is in the books so far; spending time worrying about who might choose to run in an election 42 months away suggests we’re working with a set of seriously misplaced priorities.

To read the full editorial, turn to usnews.com.

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As important as Republican core principles are, it is the potential outcomes those principles and ideas generate that, in the end, win elections. How effectively Republican candidates translate these ideas into clear policies will determine whether the party succeeds in the future.

To read the full article, click to nationalreview.com.

David Winston, a GOP pollster who has long advised House Speaker John Boehner, said that Republicans have to overcome Mitt Romney’s failure to combat Obama’s message, which complicates their efforts to cast themselves as the party of fiscal zen.

“The opportunity is clearly there, it’s just made a lot more difficult given the nature of the 2012 campaign,” Winston said.

He said using the word “balanced” is a good way to get voters’ attention. But, he cautioned, it’s the first step in a politician’s persuasion effort, not the last one.

“They’re going to say ‘What does he mean by balanced approach?’” Winston said. “They are going to want to understand what that represents. The communications element to this is coming up with a clearly and easily consumable way of describing what you mean in terms of that idea.”

Read more on politico.com.

“If you’ve at least defined and everybody’s accepted the reasons why the election went so poorly, that’s just a critical starting point,” said David Winston, a veteran Republican pollster who does survey-taking for the House GOP caucus.

Read more: politico.com

“Most people agree [with Republicans] that the deficit is one of the reasons the economy can’t get back on track,” said David Winston, a GOP pollster who advises House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “So let’s get to work cutting the deficit. And then we can ask a second question: Do you really want your taxes to go up?”

To read the full op-ed, click to latimes.com.

“Republicans are saying: We need to put the cuts on the board,” said GOP strategist David Winston, who is close to the House Republican leadership. “We need to start talking about how we deal with this spending problem.”

To read the full article, turn to latimes.com.

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It is easy to say that the GOP’s problem isn’t a messaging problem, it’s a candidate problem. Or that it’s not a candidate problem but a demographics problem. Or that it is not a demographics problem, it’s a technology problem. Or that it’s not a technology problem, it’s a policy and solutions problem.

The hard truth is that it is all of the above.

The problems that face my party are interconnected, and a piecemeal plan for fixing the GOP is not enough. We need an “all of the above” approach to rebuilding the party, and we need to start that hard work today.

Click here to read the full post.

David Winston, a Republican pollster and strategist who advises House Republicans, said the key to a successful policy campaign is two-fold.

“The first and central is how important is solving whatever problem is being defined,” he said. “The second one is does the defined benefit solve the problem.”

He argues that even though Obama in 2010 won the health care fight in a partisan showdown, the public didn’t judge health care to be as important as dealing with the economy. As a result, Republicans won control of the House in elections that year.

To read the full article, click to ap.org

There is simply no reason for the GOP to accept “additional revenue,” Democrats’ cutesy euphemism for higher taxes, now. Spending cuts are coming. The president can work across the aisle to target those cuts more carefully, but he cannot force his opposition to trade them away for something they don’t want. Unlike with the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, allowing current law to go into effect does not produce an unacceptable outcome for Republicans. Cuts from a scalpel may be preferable to cuts from a machete, but when you’re $16 trillion in debt, cuts from any instrument beat none at all.

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An excerpt:

David Winston, a top GOP pollster and close adviser to Boehner, unveiled the House Republicans’ most recent favorable rating based on his own analysis: It came in at a barrel-scraping 27 percent.
House Democrats’ numbers are a full 19 points higher at 46 percent. Winston’s analysis: Neither party is popular, but the GOP is less so. The lawmakers heard that the way to turn things around is for the party to pivot squarely to the economy and jobs — the chief concerns of most voters.

Read more: politico.com

David Winston, a veteran GOP pollster who advises Boehner, agreed.
“When things are more focused around spending, there will be more unity,” he said. “The next votes won’t have colliding elements in them.”

Read more: politico.com.

“Prior to this president, no president had ever run a deficit over a trillion dollars,” says David Winston, a veteran pollster for House Republicans. “[Obama’s] negative impact on the economy is his Achilles’ heel.”

To read the full article, turn to realclearpolitics.com.

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To watch the full segment, click to: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/hardball/50367400

Speaking at a closed-door House Republican Conference meeting the day after he was reelected as speaker with resistance from some conservatives, the Ohio Republican cited a poll by his adviser David Winston that showed “72 percent of Americans agree any increase in the nation’s debt limit must be accompanied by spending cuts and reforms of a greater amount.

Read more: politico.com.

Republican pollster David Winston, who advises House GOP leaders, said the party must move on from a weak 2012 message on the economy and define something sharper moving forward: “One of the problems Republicans in Congress are having right now is they’re trying to have the economic debate that should have happened in the fall campaign that didn’t. As a result, they’re trying to both have an economic debate and manage a legislative process. That’s made it very, very difficult for Republicans in Congress as they face this situation.”

Read more: politico.com.

“When you don’t argue the point at all, the other side wins,” said David Winston, a Republican strategist and adviser to Boehner. “The president went into this debate coming out of this campaign with the upper hand because no one had made an argument.”

To read the full article, click through to bloomberg.com.

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“You have to make an argument. You have to go out there and engage. You can’t just simply assert a position,” said GOP pollster David Winston, who advises the House leadership. “Part of the dynamic for Boehner is that he’s trying to have the debate over economic policies that should have occurred during the election, and he also has to deal with this piece of legislation.”

To read more, turn to washingtonpost.com.

The main purpose of media polls, Republican pollster David Winston argued at a recent post-election forum, is to “tell a story.” Although they generally forecast the right winner, public polls told very different stories about horse race trends in the final weeks of the campaign. A true judgement of accuracy would take those differing stories into account.

To read the full article, turn to huffingtonpost.com

In a matter of months, a vote will be needed to raise the debt limit so the nation can pay its bills. That has the potential to create a replay of the 2011 battle that led to the current standoff. A new bill to keep the federal government functioning will also be due in the spring.

“Both sides need to recognize what the other can do,” said David Winston, a longtime GOP strategist who is close to the House leadership. “Republicans and Democrats, the last thing they want to do is go off the fiscal cliff.”

To read the full article, turn to latimes.com.

Many Democrats argue President Barack Obama’s reelction was a mandate to raise tax rates on wealthier Americans, but post-election surveys from the Winston Group and Third Way found public sentiment is more complicated. These polls reveals more Americans – including those who voted for Mr. Obama – favor tax reform and/or spending cuts instead of just raising taxes for the rich.

To read the full report, access the .pdf here: Polling News & Notes, December 6, 2012.

U.S. public debt has increased eightfold since 1986. Thus far, Americans have enjoyed more than $16 trillion in benefits beyond what they’ve actually paid for. As a result, we have precious little sense of the true costs of the programs we now expect our government to provide us. As any economist will tell you, being insulated from the price of something inevitably leads consumers to demand more of it. Is there reason to believe government is any different?

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Boehner used a three-page slide show to prove his point, drawing on a recent poll by David Winston. The poll, displayed on blue pages and festooned by stars, displayed three statistics that bolstered the House Republican position on taxes: that tax rates shouldn’t go up on the rich, but the code should be reformed to eliminate loopholes and lower rates all while cutting spending.

Read more: politico.com

They pointed to a new poll by the Winston Group, a GOP research firm whose president, David Winston, is close to Boehner. Sixty-five percent of those surveyed preferred a deal that wipes out “special interest tax loopholes and deductions commonly used by the wealthy” over an approach that raises tax rates on “Americans earning more than $250,000” on Jan. 1.

To read the full article, turn to washingtonpost.com.

“Just because there is a six-year itch doesn’t mean it will happen,” said Winston, who now advises House Speaker John Boehner. “You go back to 1998, there were some Republicans who thought they were going to gain 20 to 30 seats, and they ended up losing five or six.”

To read the full article, turn to politico.com.

Wise words from Kristen Soltis, a pollster and policy analyst at the Winston Group:

The challenge to Republicans and conservatives today is to answer the question: How do our policies make everyone better off? How do we solve the problems we face in the modern era? And how do we tell that message to others?

To read the full piece, turn to nationalreview.com.

What’s remarkable is the consistency of the percentage of voters calling themselves Democrats over that time period. In those eight presidential elections, Democratic party ID has never dipped below 37 percent and never risen above 39 percent.
There has been more fluctuation in Republican party ID over that time. Republicans reached 37 percent of the electorate in the 2004 election but have dipped to 32 percent in each of the last two presidential contests — the party’s lowest ebb in 30 years.

To read the full blog post, turn to washingtonpost.com.

An excerpt:

The glaring truth we Republicans have to face following this election is that there are simply not enough of us anymore. Independent voters broke for Mitt Romney by a five-point margin, but the significant numbers advantage enjoyed by Democrats put President Obama back in the White House. We have not evolved our coalition to keep up with a changing America. Given this reality and the need for the GOP to expand its ranks, what is the Republican Party offering that would persuade anyone to join our cause?

To read the full article, turn to usnews.com.

Access the updated .pdf here: National Exit Polls: Party Identification and Ideology Breakdowns

“The results fell within the 2004 result and the 2008 result, obviously closer to 2008,” said Winston, who advises the House GOP leaders — who fared well on Tuesday. “That was clearly how everybody had been describing what the potential range was. The question is, as people were assessing their individual campaigns, whether it be the presidential or down ballot for that, was how were they working through the potential scenarios as far as what could happen.”

Read more: politico.com

GOP pollster David Winston, asked about his party’s miscalculation, said that there had been more “interest, engagement, enthusiasm” around Romney after he aced the first debate, which established a “new equilibrium” that some people perceived as momentum. “You’re seeing increased activity, so it looks better,” Winston said. “But that activity didn’t represent him leading the race.”

To read more, turn to nationaljournal.com.

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Another argument I heard was that with the polls this close, the election really comes down to turnout. “The number of variables in terms of turnout that still exist are major,” e-mailed David Winston, director of the Winston Group. “Party ID, minority composition, younger voters [all] make it more complicated to assess.’

To read the full article, turn to washingtonpost.com.

“Among the ‘Overall’ responses, television was still the most popular device, but computers were a reasonably close second, well ahead of radio. Additionally, radio is beginning to see some stiff competition from smartphones,” said Winston.

To read the full post, turn to washingtonexaminer.com.

…Mr. Romney came to the debate with a strategy that avoided harsh attacks on Mr. Obama’s foreign-policy record, instead offering voters his own foreign-policy direction for the future. Several times during the debate when Mr. Obama went on the offensive, Mr. Romney calmly told the president he was more interested in talking about where each of them would take the country rather than engaging a rhetorical war of attrition.

To read the full post, turn to blogs.wsj.com.