As
diared by mollyd yesterday, mollyd relayed how they received what basically amounts to a push-poll attack against Ned Lamont and favoring Joe "Kiss Bush" Lieberman in Connecticut.
Follow me below the fold....
From
mollyd's diary yesterday:
The first questions seemed very normal. They were about my history of voting, and demographic questions. but...
At the end came the kicker. They asked to respond to two statements and about whether I was more reassured about the candidate:
The two statements:
The first was a long statement (really a mini-speech)by Joe Lieberman and how he WOULD DEFINITELY run as an independant if he lost the primary. And how if elected as an independant he would continue to caucus and vote with the Democrats; and would continue to show his loyalty to the Democratic Party.
The second was a statement ABOUT Lamont stating how in Greenwich he side with Republicans 80% of the time including to cut school funding.
There is the context...
Then in the comments Larksour states that the caller ID was (801) 437-3150. Doing some more googling on that number.. and it seems to be a company called Western Wats who claims to be the leading provider of survey research data collection.
Now get this... (from Seven Days via Progressive America):
Seven Days identified the firm that called Ruffle as Western Wats, an independent market-data collection firm based in Orem, Utah, which also does political polls. In 1996, according to the Washington Post, then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole admitted that his campaign had hired Western Wats to push-poll 300 to 600 Iowa voters during the Republican primary against rival Steve Forbes.
[...]
When contacted by Seven Days, Robert Maccabee, director of client services for Western Wats, initially denied that his company was conducting a "study" in Vermont. However, confronted with the name of the Western Wats employee who spoke with Ruffle, Maccabee amended his response to: "We can neither confirm nor deny that we are doing that study." Asked if he could provide a list of questions being asked of Vermonters, he said, "Absolutely not. All the surveys we do are completely confidential and proprietary."
So we possibly have a company that previously did push-polling for Bob Dole in 1996, now making push-poll calls against Lamont and for Lieberman.... can others here dig some more?