^back

Basics

• Twitter: @blueprint_2024
• Website: blueprint2024.com
• Pyrophore IFF: 🟨 Probable foe

People

Individuals affiliated with Blueprint in some capacity include:

• Alyssa Cass¹
• Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn CEO, primary donor²
• Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster³
• Sean McElwee, allegedly, as an unpaid consultant⁴

Detail

Blueprint is a United States public opinion research (polling) firm. In terms of target audience, they are aligned with the Democratic Party. Media coverage, both sympathetic and adversarial, consistently presents them as centrist (see, e.g., Dayen, 2023; Freedlander, 2024).

The primary reason for Blueprint’s Pyrophore listing is that they have previously released polling which used deceptive statistical techniques to present the defence of trans rights as an electoral liability for the Democrats. Media coverage suggests Blueprint has a record of behaving similarly on other issues — for instance, polling voters on border control measures in a way which actively de-emphasised the consequences of those measures (Freedlander, op cit).

Timeline

2024, November 8. Blueprint publishes a poll, “Why America chose Trump: Inflation, immigration, and the Democratic brand” (Blueprint, 2024).

The poll was conducted by presenting respondents with random pairs of potential reasons to vote against Harris and asking them to select which they found more compelling. Among other things, the report asserts that the reason assigned the highest priority by swing voters who chose Trump (the tacit focus of the poll and of Democratic Party outreach) was:

Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class

However, this is an example of push polling through the use of a loaded question. To be more precise, by formulating this question in this way, Blueprint compelled respondents who believed Harris had not focused enough on helping the middle class to also endorse the assertion that Harris was too focused on “cultural issues like transgender issues”. No other response concerning Harris’ middle class policy was available. No other topic except transgender rights was made the subject of a loaded question in this way. Survey design is a fairly basic element of polling; consequently it is not plausible that this was unintentional.

Footnotes

1. Blueprint (2024). ↩︎
2. Freedlander (2024). ↩︎
3. Freedlander (op cit). ↩︎
4. Dayen (2023); Freedlander (op cit). ↩︎

References

Blueprint (2024, November 8). Why America chose Trump: Inflation, immigration, and the Democratic brand. Retrieved 10 November 2024.

Dayen, D. (2023, November 14). Sean McElwee consulted for new centrist polling project. The American Prospect. Retrieved 10 November 2024.

Freedlander, D. (2024, June 21). Do liberals have it all wrong about how to beat Trump?: Backed by Reid Hoffman, a centrist polling picks a big fight in the Democratic Party. Intelligencer. Retrieved 10 November 2024.

Metadata

• Revision: 1 (10 November 2024).
• Created: 10 November 2024.