Neil Newhouse, Mitt Romney’s campaign pollster, suddenly finds himself in an unfamiliar place — out on a limb.
The survey-taker, who helped build Public Opinion Strategies into the largest Republican polling firm and has a solid reputation among operatives and colleagues, is growing increasingly vocal with reporters and Romney supporters in the campaign’s closing days about what he sees as examples of flawed public polling, and his sense of the race — particularly in Ohio — as basically even.

Newhouse is not known for seeking attention, but through the course of the presidential campaign, his profile has risen. He has been part of some public state-of-the-race calls, and is a frequent fixture on calls and in conversations with Romney surrogates and donors, telling GOP elites in one discussion last week that a Quinnipiac University survey with The New York Times and CBS was “crap.” (Newhouse said he didn’t recall using that word.)

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It is because of Newhouse’s strong reputation that many Republicans have believed his assertions that Democrats are misreading the math, and why members of Romney’s campaign have stayed positive even when things have seemed publicly to be slipping from reach.

“Neil Newhouse is probably the most respected GOP pollster in the country,” said Nick Everhart, president of the Delaware, Ohio-based Strategy Group for Media, who has worked with POS repeatedly. “I think under-appreciated or respected when he pushes back hard on the public polling especially in Ohio, is that I feel like without question there isn’t a pollster in this country ever who has conducted or taken as many polls as Neil has in the state of Ohio. He’s practically an Ohio-based strategist the amount of work he’s done here, so it’s very hard not to take his comments and critiques of the rest of the public survey data coming out of the state seriously.”


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