Push Polling

We'll talk about a bit about this phenomenon this week.

You may have gotten a call from Gabriel Joseph III already. It starts with one of those cheery robo-voices asking if you'll participate in a 45-second survey. If you don't slam the phone down at that point, you'll soon get to a question like this one: "In America when a person dies, the IRS can take up to 55 percent of the inheritance left for family and friends. Do you want Congress to permanently eliminate this unfair tax?" Next, you'll be told that the Democrat running for Congress in your district "voted to keep the death tax in place and refused to vote to make permanent the tax cuts that have caused record economic growth in 2001." At that point, you'll know that you're dealing with a "push poll"—one of the dirtier, yet mostly legal, tricks in a political operative's bag of last-minute campaign tools.

Push pollsters operate behind the scenes: They don't advertise their services, don't go on TV, and often can't be tracked as they hide behind dozens of aliases. The push polling firm that placed calls to voters in the South Carolina GOP primary in 2000, suggesting that John McCain had an out-of-wedlock child who was black, was never identified, though the calls may well have cost McCain that election.

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Dave Johnson, a fellow at the Commonweal Institute, a progressive think tank based in California, says push polls are among the most effective forms of political messaging, far more persuasive even than TV spots. "People are inclined to believe you when they think they're getting a poll," he explains. "It immediately adds credibility to what they're hearing." Push pollsters also identify voters' party preferences—information that can then be used in get-out-the-vote campaigns. Just how successful these tactics are is a matter of some debate, but according to Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, they certainly have an effect. "Even if they change just 1 percent of the vote, that's a close election margin," he told me in an email. Nancy Mathiowetz, the president-elect of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says that with the use of robo-calling, "we've seen a proliferation of push polling this year, because it's relatively cheap."