2008’s Push Polling Season Gets Underway
It’s started already.
The Romney Campaign is complaining about a number of anti-Mormon, seemingly pro-McCain calls to voters in a couple swing states. They’re claiming it’s push polling, and want it stopped.
Push polling is the most graceful of all political techniques. Here’s how it works: Companies are hired to ‘poll’ the electorate. The calls start out normally - swing staters are used to getting a barrage of call - but they then ask questions designed to plant ideas, usually negative, in voters’ minds.
I find it very difficult to believe that the McCain camp would be behind these attacks. In 2000, McCain got push polled right out of the primaries by the Bush camp. They made calls in a number of Southern states, polling the electorate on such important questions as, ‘Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?’
McCain has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh.
The 2000 push polls just made insinuations, but, according to the voters in the NYT story, it appears the techniques are getting more blatant.
Among the questions the caller asked was whether the person receiving the call knew Romney was a Mormon, that he received military deferments when he served as a Mormon missionary in France, that his five sons did not serve in the military, that Romney’s faith did not accept blacks as bishops into the 1970s and that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is superior to the Bible.
”It started out like all the other calls. … Then all of the sudden it got very unsettling and very negative,” said Anne Baker, an independent voter who was called in Hollis, N.H.
You can just tell Rove isn’t on the campaign trail anymore.
But actually, the fact that the calls were so blatant makes me a little suspicious. Romney’s come out firing, but his rhetoric is surprisingly similar to Bush’s during the 2004 Swift Boat attacks. He’s blaming the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reforms (which opened up the loophole for 527s like moveon.org and the Swift Boaters).
These attacks were really over the top offensive and obvious to be effective push polling and this story’s gotten on the radar pretty fast. The two insinuations that it’s McCain’s fault either way makes me suspicious. Though Walnuts has gone off the rails a bit in recent months, I don’t believe he would ever do this. The Bush push polling in 2000 was really nasty and went after his kid; he’s a decent human, and decent people don’t push poll.
The only think keeping me from a Romney conspiracy is that he doesn’t need to knock McCain out. If it was more tied to the Giuliani camp, I’d be pretty darn suspicious.
Sometimes I hate the way our elections work. Why can’t you just win on your fitness as a candiate instead of this vitriol?
NH Probes Anti-Romney ‘Poll’ Calls [NYT]
Sphere: Related Content