Rand Paul contracts well-known internal pollster for his upcoming presidential campaign.

[Statistikhengst]

A sure sign that Rand Paul (R-KY) is running in 2016 and is definitely announcing next Tuesday, April, 7, 2015:

Rand Paul signs pollster for presidential campaign - Alex Isenstadt - POLITICO

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has signed Tony Fabrizio, a veteran Republican pollster, to join his 2016 presidential campaign, according to a source familiar with the move.


Fabrizio joins a growing Paul campaign team that includes campaign manager-in-waiting Chip Englander, and advisers Steve Munisteri, Mike Biundo, and Doug Stafford.


Fabrizio’s resume is a long one: He worked on then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential campaign — Perry recently inked Greg Strimple to poll for his likely campaign — and was a top strategist on Bob Dole’s 1996 bid. Fabrizio also serves as a top adviser to Florida Gov. Rick Scott.

Paul, a first-term Republican, will be kicking off his presidential campaign next Tuesday during an appearance in Louisville, Ky., at the Galt House hotel. The senator will then be heading to New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Iowa for a tour of early primary states.

Some background information: his polling firm is Fabrizio-Ward LLC:

Fabrizio Ward LLC About Us Biographies

Mr. Fabrizio has a long, IMPRESSIVE and extremely interesting resume. He is a known player in the polling business.


If you've never heard of him, don't feel bad about it. Most people don't ever hear of him because he usually only does internal campaign polling and is therefore not known or recognized as a public pollster. This, imo, is neither good nor bad, but it DOES mean that Fabrizio has no real public record of public polling results to compare with actual results and so we cannot really measure any kind of accuracy by this firm. Here I am speaking only of mathematics, mathematical bias and mathematical trends of any given pollster, not of subjective feelings.

Fabrizio sometimes teams up with another firm called "McLaughlin" (R), which sometimes does public polling, but also does internal work. For instance, this internal poll was released one month after it was taken, in 2013, as an immediate response to a public poll that the Rick Scott team did not like:

Internal Rick Scott poll Charlie Crist up in Florida - James Hohmann - POLITICO.com

This is not totally uncommon. Right after the "47%" controversy with Mitt Romney erupted in September 2012, and after a Columbus Dispatch poll showed Obama shooting to +9 over Romney in the all-important state of Ohio, the Obama team released the results of an internal poll, taken at the same time, with the same +9 result. This tactic is often used either to demoralize the "other team" and sometimes used by a losing candidate to bolster his last hopes. It's all part of the mud-game of politics.

Tony Fabrizio is not without controversy:

Rick Perry Campaign s Giant Farce How Top Advisers Deceived Press

The backstory is this: With the campaign stumbling in December 2011, Perry's advisers decided to roll the dice on a highly divisive ad that criticized the idea that gay soldiers can serve openly in the military while children "can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school."

At the time, Perry's top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, was known in political circles as being gay but not formally "out." Several members of the Republican LGBT community were nevertheless outraged that he would be associated with an ad that expressed that type of message.

When reached for his reaction to those concerns at the time, Fabrizio said that he had actually raised objections to the ad. Asked for proof, he put HuffPost in touch with Nelson Warfield, his fellow top staffer.

The above material is not hearsay, it is fact. Since then, Mike Fabrizio was outed by GOProud (a Conservative gay group) as gay and he never demented the claim. In fact, this outing made such a scene that the late Andrew Breitbart stepped down from the board of GOProud. And at the time, I applauded him for sticking to his principles. I still do.

My opinion: pfft, Who cares? His sexuality has nothing to do with the quality of his work, most of which we never get to measure, because it is internal polling. Internal pollsters are kind of like electoral "ghosts" whom we occasionally spot on the periphery of election comings-and-goings, but never really get to meet.

But if you will remember, Mitt Romney had a member of his staff who was also gay (Grenell) and many Conservatives across the country went just crazy until Grenell left the team.

There is more information about Fabrizio, also with his involvement with Rick Scott (R-FL) here:

Tony Fabrizio


This makes Rand Paul's choice of Fabrizio an interesting one and makes it clear that Paul is going all the way.