Donna Victoria

Donna Victoria is the founder of Victoria Research and has been a pollster since 1989. She started her business around these concepts: accessibility, commitment, integrity and accuracy.

Donna has been the pollster and political strategist for gubernatorial, congressional, state legislative, mayoral, and other candidates up and down the ballot. She also conducts polling for ballot initiatives, issue advocacy, labor unions, government clients, and membership organizations across a wide spectrum of issues.

In 2020, she ignored the “blacklist” for helping Congressional challengers and elected Marie Newman (IL-03) to a Chicago district seat that was held by an anti-Choice, anti-LGBTQ, anti-ACA Democrat. 2018 Donna worked with Women VOTE to shepherd numerous women candidates through hotly contested primaries, including the first Democratic woman elected to Congress from Iowa and Sharice Davids, and LGBT Native American elected to Congress from Kansas. She help Marc Elrich win a seven-way primary to become the new County Executive of Montgomery County (MD), and helped the Maryland House of Delegates Democratic Caucus win back a record number of seats, despite an easy win for Republican Governor Larry Hogan at the top of the ticket. In 2017 VRC helped elect new mayors in both San Antonio and Minneapolis.

Prior to founding Victoria Research, she worked at Lauer, Lalley, Victoria Inc. (LLV), a Washington based public opinion and polling firm In 2000-2001 Donna was a Vice President for Socratic Technologies, designing and conducting some of the earliest online surveys, Web usability studies, customer satisfaction models, and new product development studies. She developed an early online dial-testing prototype in 2000 to test live reaction to Super Bowl ads.

Originally from West Palm Beach, Florida Donna holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Florida. She has lectured on political polling and research at the Yale Women’s Campaign School, at Training Ms. President for a consortium of Maryland liberal arts colleges, at the University of Florida’s graduate degree program in Political Campaigning and at the Women & Politics Institute at American University. She is a member of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC).