The Sound of HRC Push-Polling (w/audio! and poll!)
Fri Apr 25, 2008 at 10:45:37 AM PDT
Paul Loeb over at HuffPo has posted a article today called Is Hillary Clinton Push Polling?. It tells the story of David LaMotte, a North Carolina progressive who had the presence of mind to start recording a phone call when he realized it was not an internal poll from Hillary Clinton's campaign, conducted by the firm of Geoff Garin, her new campaign head, but in fact a push poll by that same firm, smearing Barack Obama.
As Loeb writes:
It wasn't as bad as asking "would it change your mind if you knew John Kerry actually bought his Vietnam medals off eBay." Or "How do you feel about John McCain's illegitimate black children?" But it was a push poll nonetheless, even if it also had elements of information gathering and message testing. This isn't the first time that the Clinton campaign or their allies have had pollsters offering positive information about Clinton and negative information about her opponents--they did it on the eve of the California primary and in South Carolina. (And firms linked to the Giuliani campaign made highly negative push poll calls against Mitt Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire) But it's a disturbing practice precisely because it tries to spin the recipient under the pretense of merely asking about their views.
In a fascinating turn of events, LaMotte recorded the tail end of the call, and Loeb embeds the audio in his article:
Listen to the ugly sounds of push-polling
As LaMotte says, the questions started off innocently enough, and he was delighted to participate in what he thought was an internal poll for the Clinton campaign, given that the caller, when prompted, said he was calling from Garin's firm.
But then...
Then the questions turned to long Hillary-praising and Barack bashing policy statements with the response options being "Do you consider that a very strong, strong or weak or very weak reason to support her candidacy for president?" which is kind of an unanswerable question, and clearly not the point. At the end of the conversation they asked "Now based on everything we've discussed, who would you vote for?"
The questions were often based on statements that I wouldn't agree with in the first place. It's classic push polling as I've read about it, though never experienced it before. The questions are of the "Are you still beating your wife?" variety. No way to answer with any sense of veracity and integrity.
Is this what desperation sounds like? What does it say about a Democratic candidate's outlook on their own chances that they resort to these kinds of typically-Republican smear tactics?
I thought the tide was turning...
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