Morning Consult

About Morning Consult

Morning Consult is an American business intelligence company that pairs large-scale survey research with a newsroom covering the intersection of policy, politics, and business, publishing at morningconsult.com. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., the company grew out of a health-care policy newsletter its co-founder Michael Ramlet started while in college, and it has since become one of the most prolific private polling operations in the world, surveying tens of thousands of people across the globe every day. Valued at more than $1 billion after a 2021 funding round, Morning Consult counts half of the Fortune 500 among its clients and employs more than 500 people across offices in Washington, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

History and founding

Morning Consult was established in 2014, though its origins stretch back a year earlier to a health-care policy and business email newsletter that Michael Ramlet created while he was a student. The newsletter — a mix of the top business and political stories on the health-care industry — went viral among health-care executives after Ramlet moved to Washington, D.C. Ramlet quit his day job, brought on Meghan McCarthy as editor-in-chief and Kyle Dropp as head of polling and data science, and built the newsletter into a company that fused news, polling, and data. The founding team — Ramlet as chief executive, Dropp as president, and Alex Dulin as chief technology officer — started the business out of a Capitol Hill rowhouse Ramlet found on Craigslist, bootstrapping it from $30,000 in angel capital.

The founders

Michael Ramlet, the co-founder and CEO, earned his bachelor's degree in business strategy and public policy from the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, where he later served as an adjunct lecturer, and worked as a principal at the bipartisan communications firm Purple Strategies before founding Morning Consult. He has been named an Ernst & Young Technology Entrepreneur of the Year and recognized in Ad Age's 40 Under 40, the Washington Business Journal's 40 Under 40, and Politico Playbook's Power List. Kyle Dropp, the company's president and original head of polling and data science, brought academic survey-research expertise to the founding team, while Alex Dulin built the technology platform that powers its always-on polling operation.

The decision-intelligence model

Morning Consult describes itself as a decision-intelligence company delivering insights on what people think in real time. Its core innovation was to industrialize survey research: instead of commissioning one-off polls, it built proprietary technology that surveys tens of thousands of people around the world every day, producing continuous tracking data on brands, economic sentiment, and political attitudes. The company argues that this scale and speed give business and political leaders a true measure of public opinion as it moves — data granular enough to slice by demographics, geography, and industry, and fresh enough to inform decisions on timelines that traditional polling cannot match.

The polling operation

The polling engine is the heart of the business. Morning Consult runs high-frequency tracking surveys covering consumer confidence, brand favorability, economic expectations, and political horse-race numbers, among many other topics. Its data has been cited as influencing decisions well beyond media coverage: company profiles note that its economic sentiment data has been used by major central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, in their assessments of the macroeconomic climate. The operation's scale — tens of thousands of interviews daily — was a genuine break from a market-research industry that, as Ramlet has noted, had seen little fundamental change since the 1980s.

The newsroom

From the beginning, Morning Consult treated journalism as a core product rather than a marketing arm. By early 2016 the company had a 16-person editorial team producing 20 to 25 original stories a week, many of them built on the company's proprietary polling data — a combination one industry observer compared to the data-driven approaches of FiveThirtyEight and The Upshot. Under editor-in-chief Meghan McCarthy, a former National Journal and Congressional Quarterly reporter who spent six years covering Congress with a focus on health policy after the Affordable Care Act, the newsroom grew to more than 15 reporters and editors covering policy and politics on Capitol Hill and in the heavily regulated health, energy, finance, and technology industries.

Data journalism in practice

The newsroom's signature move is to turn fresh polling into original reporting before anyone else has the numbers. An early example came in January 2016, when news leaked that former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was considering a presidential run: while most outlets published commentary on the scoop, Morning Consult polled 1,500 registered voters on Bloomberg's prospects and produced an original data story that was subsequently picked up by The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, Politico, and others. That template — proprietary data, fast turnaround, newsroom packaging — became the company's calling card and a demonstration to clients of what its research engine could do.

Growth and valuation

Morning Consult's growth has been rapid. From 33 staffers in early 2016, the company roughly doubled year over year, tripled in size during the pandemic, and by the early 2020s employed more than 500 people across 35 states. In 2018 it announced national expansion from its Washington base to New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco, by which point it said more than 265 major brands, trade associations, and nonprofits relied on its intelligence products. In June 2021 the company closed a Series B funding round that valued it at more than $1 billion — $1.02 billion, according to contemporaneous reports — cementing its status as a unicorn in the market-research space.

Business model and clients

The company sells subscriptions to its data and intelligence platform — Morning Consult Intelligence — along with custom research and brand-tracking products. Enterprise clients use the platform to monitor brand health, test messaging, track economic sentiment, and benchmark against competitors on a near-daily cadence that traditional research firms cannot match — a recurring-revenue engine, rather than news advertising, that underwrote the company's unicorn valuation. Its client base spans the Fortune 500, trade associations, nonprofits, and political organizations; the company has said half of the Fortune 500 are customers. The news operation, while editorially independent, serves a dual function: it is a respected trade publication in its own right, and it demonstrates the power of the underlying data to prospective clients. The model's bet is that in an era of rapid news cycles, leaders will pay a premium for opinion data that is both continuous and immediately interpretable.

Coverage areas

Editorially, Morning Consult covers the ground where policy meets markets: health-care regulation, energy and environmental policy, financial regulation, technology policy, and electoral politics, with a particular emphasis on how Washington decisions ripple through industries. Its reporters work the Capitol Hill beat alongside industry-specific coverage, and the publication's data visualizations and charts have become a familiar feature of its storytelling. The audience is the leadership class the company sells to — executives, lobbyists, policymakers, and investors — though its polling releases are widely cited in general-interest media.

Outlook

More than a decade after its founding, Morning Consult's central question is whether a company built on the marriage of polling technology and journalism can keep growing as both industries consolidate. The pandemic years supercharged demand for real-time sentiment data; the challenge since has been to convert that demand into durable enterprise subscriptions while keeping the newsroom's editorial credibility intact. With a unicorn valuation, a global polling apparatus, and a client roster drawn from the largest companies in America, the firm Ramlet started from a college newsletter now sits at the center of how corporate America measures what the public thinks.