ICYMI: Politico Spotlights HIT Strategies with Feature Story. The Atlantic Extensively Covers Polling on Young Voters

Washington, DC | October 11th– In case you missed it, last week Politico spotlighted HIT Strategies with a feature story on the firm’s expanding team and HIT’s role in the political consulting industry. And this week, The Atlantic extensively covered founding partner Terrance Woodbury’s predictions regarding young voters in Georgia and how the generational gap will be a defining factor for Democrats’ chances in the midterms.

Read excerpts from both articles below.

Major Democratic polling firm expands before midterm election
Politico // Marissa Martinez
 

Key points featuring HIT and HIT Partners

• Founded by Terrance Woodbury and Roshni Nedungadi in 2019, HIT Strategies is one of the fastest-growing firms of its kind. Their most recent expansion includes new hires from other agencies including Change Research and Equis Research, and the additions have built their team to nearly 40 full-time staffers, including communications, data and sales teams.

• “We found a lot of times, when we were speaking to potential clients or part of the political establishment, they would say, ‘It’s so hard to reach audiences like younger voters or AAPI voters,’” Nedungadi said, adding that those barriers became excuses to not reach out to new communities.
• “Part of the value of having HIT on board is they’re able to help us with both — make sure we’re asking the right questions or teasing out the right concerns among communities of color, but also helping us think through the other, larger-scale piece,” Raj [DCCC Deputy ED of Analytics] said. “We get to … have them help us think across the entire map.”
• “Our messaging doesn’t try to improve the way that Black voters or young voters feel about Democrats or policy. It’s to improve their perception of their own power and how they use that power to not only elect Democrats but then to hold them accountable,” Woodbury said.

What Will Happen in Georgia? Millennial and Gen Z voters have serious power in the South.

The Atlantic // Ron Brownstein | October 7^th

Democrats face some serious headwinds. Never enthusiastic about President Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic primaries, young people have given him lackluster approval ratings throughout his presidency. Generally operating with less of a financial cushion than older voters, young people have also been more affected by the highest inflation in four decades. “The cost of living is going up, but our salaries are not,” Alexia Brookins, a manager at a construction company, told me at the AME event sponsored by the group Millennials of Faith last weekend.

In a mid-September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, just 37 percent of Millennials and Gen Z said that Biden’s actions had strengthened the economy; 55 percent said that he had weakened it. In a late-September Yahoo News/YouGov survey, only about one-fifth of young adults ages 18 to 44 said life was better for people like them since Biden took office (the rest said it was unchanged or worse).

Terrance Woodbury, a partner at HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young voters of color, worries that these verdicts will make it difficult for Democrats to reach the turnout and margins they need among young voters. In polling that HIT recently conducted for the NAACP, he told me, three-fourths of Black adults younger than 50 said their lives had not improved since Biden took office.

Woodbury told me that although the media seem fixated on whether potential Republican gains among men will widen the Black gender gap this year, he expects that the “generational gap” in the African American community will be much wider. “Younger voters are much more likely to say Democrats take Black voters for granted, much less likely to approve of the direction of the country, and much less likely to approve of the performance of Democrats in Congress and the White House,” he told me. “All of that is significantly higher by a generation than by gender. I actually do think there is a real risk of Democrats underperforming with young voters, and specifically young voters of color.”

About HIT  
As Washington’s leading millennial and minority-owned public opinion research company, HIT Strategies helps progressive leaders and organizations translate the values and attitudes of target audiences into real-time insights. We understand America’s fastest-growing electorate and consumer groups and specialize in targeting communities under-represented in public opinion, including Black Americans, Latino Americans, Millennials + Genz, LGBTQ+, Women, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders. Visit hitstrat.com and follow @HITStrat on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for more information.