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BlueLabs promotes Joy Wilke to Vice President of Polling. Wilke brings a decade of methodological innovation to BlueLabs' polling and focus group practice WASHINGTON, D.C. - BlueLabs, a leading analytics firm specializing in polling, message testing, and qualitative research, today announced the promotion of Joy Wilke to Vice President of Polling. In her new role, Wilke will lead BlueLabs' polling and survey research practice as companies and organizations rethink how they measure public opinion in a changing landscape. "Polling is harder than ever. Response rates are at an all-time low, and AI-driven bots are flooding online panels," said Joy Wilke. "I'm honored to lead a team that is as curious, smart, and kind as they are rigorous, and together we are building the multimodal approaches that engage hard-to-reach respondents and mitigate fraud. This is the most interesting work of my career and I can't wait for what's next." Joy has built the firm's survey research practice into an industry-recognized leader in multimodal polling and methodological innovation. Her recent research on reaching the dynamic electorate, presented at this year's American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conference, revealed how infrequent voters move in and out of the electorate between cycles and why conventional polling methods often fail to reach them. "Joy is an exceptional leader and brilliant statistician who has dedicated her career to pushing the survey research field forward," said BlueLabs co-founder Elan Kriegel. "We are extremely lucky and thrilled to have her join our leadership team." A survey researcher and methodologist for more than a decade, Wilke has worked on hundreds of surveys and focus groups reaching millions of people around the world. She joined BlueLabs in 2022, having previously led polling work at a prominent research firm, served at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2018 cycle, and began her career at the Gallup Organization. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied the effects of media and campaigns on public opinion, and an M.S. in Survey Methodology from the University of Michigan. "We're moving to a world where outcomes are increasingly decided by the people who are hardest to reach and who are most skeptical of the content they're seeing," said BlueLabs partner Harrison Kreisberg. "The winners will be those who best understand these audiences so they can break through with new and relevant messages." In addition to the firm's polling operation, Wilke leads BlueLabs' focus group practice, bringing a qualitative lens to the firm's survey work and helping organizations understand not just what audiences think, but why. About BlueLabs: Founded in 2013, BlueLabs is a research and data analytics firm that helps companies and organizations understand the people they're trying to reach. Through polling, message testing, and qualitative research, BlueLabs turns rigorous data into strategy that drives measurable results. Learn more at BlueLabs.com. Q&A: AI, Hard-To-Reach Audiences, and the Future of Survey Research Q: What should organizations look for in a research partner? A: First, multimodal fielding. If a pollster only reaches people one way, they're missing important slices of the audience they're trying to understand. Second, transparency about panel quality and fraud detection; that's a huge hidden risk in survey data, and any vendor should be able to explain their methods for protecting against it. Third, a partner that treats polling as a strategic tool rather than a one-number deliverable. A topline number tells you some information, but the questions that decide races are who is persuadable, what your audience needs to hear, and how to reach them. Q: How is AI changing survey research? A: AI is both a threat and an opportunity. The biggest threat is that AI has made online panel fraud dramatically cheaper and more convincing. Bots can now generate coherent responses and pass many of the attention checks and other in-survey traps that used to identify fraudulent respondents, so maintaining data quality requires much more sophisticated detection methods. The opportunity is that these challenges are also driving innovation in survey methodology and fraud detection, and BlueLabs is working to develop better tools for identifying bad actors while preserving high-quality research. Q: How can campaigns reach the infrequent, low-propensity voters that polls usually miss? A: The first step is understanding what BlueLabs, Inc. call the "dynamic electorate," the large group of Americans who move in and out of voting between cycles rather than voting or abstaining consistently. In research BlueLabs, Inc. presented at this year's American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conference, BlueLabs, Inc. found these voters can be identified, but they're also the hardest to reach with many of today's most common survey methods. In its Michigan focus groups, infrequent voters described themselves as exhausted, financially strained, and checked out of politics. These are pragmatists reacting to their day-to-day economic reality, and reaching them takes survey design built for people who don't answer polls.

BlueLabs promotes Joy Wilke to vice president of polling. September 16, 2026 BlueLabs has promoted Joy Wilke to vice president of polling, putting the veteran survey researcher in charge of the firm's polling and survey research practice as artificial intelligence, declining response rates and changing audience behavior create new challenges for public opinion research. Wilke, who joined BlueLabs in 2022, has more than a decade of experience in survey research and methodology. Her expanded role includes leading the firm's work on multimodal polling, an approach that combines different methods of reaching respondents rather than relying primarily on online panels or a single survey channel. The promotion comes as polling organizations contend with two related data-quality problems: reaching people who rarely participate in surveys and detecting fraudulent online responses that have become more sophisticated with generative AI. BlueLabs has been developing research methods around both issues, positioning survey methodology and respondent quality as increasingly important competitive differentiators for research firms. "Polling is harder than ever," Wilke said, citing historically low response rates and AI-generated activity within online panels. She said BlueLabs is developing multimodal approaches designed to reach less accessible respondents while improving fraud detection. BlueLabs' own research illustrates the scale of the participation challenge. Research presented at the 2026 American Association for Public Opinion Research conference found an average survey response rate of 0.9% among frequent voters and 0.3% among infrequent voters. The firm has argued that heavy reliance on web panels can consequently underrepresent less politically engaged populations. (BlueLabs Analytics) Wilke's recent work has focused on what BlueLabs calls the "dynamic electorate," people whose voting participation changes between election cycles. Its research found that these infrequent voters can be identified but are particularly difficult to reach through common survey methods, creating potential gaps between conventional polling samples and the populations researchers are trying to measure. (BlueLabs Analytics) The methodological challenge extends beyond response rates. Online nonprobability panels provide researchers with speed, flexibility and lower costs, but can also be exposed to inattentive or fraudulent respondents. BlueLabs has said advances in AI are making some traditional survey fraud-detection techniques less effective because automated systems can generate increasingly coherent responses to questionnaires. (BlueLabs Analytics) Wilke has worked on hundreds of surveys and focus groups reaching millions of people globally. Before joining BlueLabs, she led polling work at another research firm, served at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2018 election cycle and began her career at Gallup. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, where her research examined the effects of media and campaigns on public opinion. She also earned a Master of Science in Survey Methodology from the University of Michigan. "Joy is an exceptional leader and brilliant statistician who has dedicated her career to pushing the survey research field forward," said BlueLabs co-founder Elan Kriegel. In addition to polling, Wilke leads the firm's focus group practice. Combining quantitative surveys with qualitative research is intended to give clients both measurement of audience attitudes and greater context around why respondents hold particular views. BlueLabs, founded in 2013, provides polling, message testing, qualitative research and data analytics for organizations seeking to understand and engage specific audiences. Its work extends beyond political research into areas including corporate communications, marketing and entertainment audience analytics. (BlueLabs Analytics) Wilke's promotion places her at the center of the firm's response to a changing survey research market, where the ability to verify respondents, reach less-engaged populations and combine multiple collection methods is becoming increasingly important to producing reliable audience intelligence.