After months of running on instinct, Donald Trump has finally hired a professional pollster who’s been around the block a few times.
Tony Fabrizio is a veteran Republican pollster who has worked for dozens and dozens of representatives, senators and presidential candidates, as well as corporate clients including Hewlett-Packard, FedEx, Pfizer and Hewlett-Packard.
Fabrizio was the chief pollster for Republican nominee Bob Dole in 1996 and primary hopeful Rick Perry in 2012. He also polled for Rick Scott and Matt Bevin, outsider businessmen who went on to become governors of Florida and Kentucky.
In a short biography Fabrizio provided to Politico, he bragged about serving “as pollster and strategist for Gov. Tim Pawlenty, whose victory in the face of the Democratic tidal wave that swept through the rest of Minnesota has been heralded in the national media as ‘one of the very few GOP bright spots nationally in an otherwise dismal year.'”
Reports speculate that the choice of Fabrizio represents an improved relationship between Trump and previous adviser Roger Stone, a friend of Fabrizio, who quit the Trump campaign in August in part because he didn’t think the candidate was taking polls seriously enough.
