For decades, campaigns have relied on polling to guide strategy, messaging, and resource allocation. But polling has a fundamental blind spot: It only tells you what voters say they care about, not what they’re actually paying attention to.

That gap is widening, and it is costing campaigns.

Take the 2025 Democratic gubernatorial primary in New Jersey. Most candidates focused on national politics, President Trump, and the economy in their messaging. Traditional polling supported that focus. But real-time news engagement data told a different story.

Among likely Democratic voters, education coverage was the top-performing issue by a wide margin. It accounted for 30 percent of all top-read local news content (up from just 18 percent the previous cycle), overtaking economic coverage for the first time. Yet polling from the same period showed only 5 percent of voters ranking education as their top concern.

Why the disconnect? Voters don’t always engage most with the issues they........

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