- Pritzker Fellows
- Current Fellows
- Patrick Ruffini
Patrick Ruffini
Republican Pollster & Co-Founder of Echelon Insights
Biography
Patrick Ruffini is a leading pollster, data analytics expert, and thought leader celebrated for accurately forecasting the results of the 2024 election and the major shifts in the political landscape that led to it. As the co-founder of Echelon Insights, one of the most innovative and award-winning polling firms in the United States, Patrick combines cutting-edge research with actionable strategies to help Fortune 500 companies, advocacy organizations, and political campaigns thrive in a rapidly changing world.
Patrick’s acclaimed book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, was hailed by The New York Times as “the book that predicted the 2024 election” and ranked among the Best Books in Politics by the Wall Street Journal. His insights into political realignment, demographic trends, and cultural shifts provide organizations with actionable data they need to adapt to changing markets, values, and audiences. Echelon Insights, under Patrick’s leadership, is recognized for its accurate track record, innovative methodologies, and strategic impact. Named one of the most accurate private polling firms by 538 and one of the most awarded polling and data firms in the country by the American Association of Political Consultants and Campaigns & Elections, Echelon helps leaders across industries understand public opinion, emerging trends, and build practical strategies for long-term success in an era of disruption.
Known for his expertise in strategic communications and data analytics, Patrick has been featured on CNBC, Fox News, NPR, and the BBC, offering political commentary, insights on elections, consumer behavior, and cultural transformations. His analyses have appeared in top publications like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Politico.
His background includes senior roles at the Republican National Committee and the George W. Bush 2004 re-election campaign, as well as founding Engage, a premier digital strategy firm.
Seminars
"Margin of Error: Polling, Populism & the Remaking of the American Electorate"
Polls are everywhere during election season yet still remain shrouded in mystery. Together, we will demystify the industry for outside observers and learn why its practices are really not that abstruse. When he started working in politics, Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and the author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, was one of those outsiders, toiling on the front lines of digital campaigns with George W. Bush and the Republican National Committee. Over a decade ago, Patrick started Echelon Insights with Kristen Soltis Anderson to use data and technology to drag the polling business into the 21st century. Patrick will talk about how they succeeded in driving change, what hasn’t changed, and why polls still work better than you think (despite a few recent misses and what you may have read about fake polls and AI). Together, we will also study the political realignments in recent years—in short, the ideological and educational groups that are most out of place in contemporary politics—and why this should continue to worry Democrats.
Seminars are off the record and open to current UChicago students only.
Who actually answers polls? How are they conducted? What do campaigns use them for? And why do people keep coming back for polls after the industry is declared dead after each election cycle?
Starting in 2004, I used the power of the Internet to help candidates raise money and organize supporters. In 2008, Barack Obama took that new model of campaigning and supercharged it to become the country’s 44th president. The forces unleashed then wouldn’t be easily contained. New technology shifted power in the parties from the establishment to the grassroots. The political insiders were no longer the masters of their own destiny.
This shift has transformed both parties, begetting continuous warfare between the GOP base and the party that claimed to represent it. This populist movement managed to nominate and elect Donald Trump and apostasies that sunk past Republicans now sail through under the banner of an all-powerful leader the base trusts implicitly. What lessons does the Trump era hold for Democrats, who are now going through their own Tea Party moment?
Trump’s takeover of the GOP surprised many—including me. I’ll reflect on what I got wrong in 2016, what the polls were telling me at the time, and how I spent the next few years learning from Trump’s realignment of the American electorate.
By polarizing the electorate on education, Trump has made the GOP the more natural home for the roughly 60 percent of Americans without a college degree. A resorting of the electorate on educational and cultural lines also made race less of a dividing line, allowing Trump to win a multiracial working-class coalition in 2024.
Right ahead of the midterms, where does this coalition stand today, and what does it say about the future of the parties in 2028 and beyond?
With one week to go, let’s take a news-driven look at the midterms. Where do the battlegrounds actually stand? Which states and races are swinging late? Beyond the national polling averages, which specific races should you be looking at to tell you how Election Night will go? Together, we’ll build an Election Night viewing guide: which returns to watch, in what order, and what each one would signal about the night ahead. Students will also workshop their draft exit-poll questions that will go on a national poll going into the field the week after the election.
*This seminar will take place on Thursday, November 5 at 3:30pm
With the results in, what actually happened? Where was the polling right, where was it wrong, and why? Which voter coalitions moved? I’ll work through the exit polls, the results, and what it all means for 2028 now that we have real data back. We’ll also do final revisions on the questions that will go on our post-election poll.
The day after the midterms sounded the starting gun for the 2028 presidential election. Who won and who lost, and who overperformed and who didn’t, is already shaping the pitch that 2028 candidates are making to donors and the media. What narratives are emerging from the midterms, and how will candidates use them as a launchpad for a national campaign?
I’ll also go over some polling data showing the different voter tribes within each party and what the target markets are for different flavors of Democratic or Republican candidates.
We’ll look back at our various predictions this quarter with data attached to stress test them. Having designed questions before the election and fielded them on a real national survey, we’ll now analyze the results together: did the electorate explain itself the way we predicted?