Conejo Valley Democrat

Reader Susan Bowman recently posted a comment that she had received a call from someone purporting to conduct a poll. This bothered her because, like many of us, Susan values her privacy: she has an unlisted number and is on the do not call list.

Unfortunately for Susan, signing up for the do not registry does not protect her or anyone else from unsolicited calls of a political nature and other forms of noncommercial speech.

Another reader, Laura Winchester, suggested that Susan was the victim of a “push poll.” I hadn’t heard of push polling until Laura’s comment, but I found some information. Kathy Frankovic wrote in a 2000 piece for CBS, “The Truth about Push Polls,” that a push poll is “political telemarketing masquerading as a poll. No one is really collecting information. No one will analyze the data.”

Push polling is a reprehensible political practice condemned by the American Association of Political Consultants.

Push polling is alleged to have been most famously used to in the racist insinuation that John McCain had black child by someone he was not married to (I loathe using the word “illegitimate” to describe children, like so many accounts of this incident did). He in fact had adopted a Bangladeshi child. See “The Anatomy of a Smear Campaign,” by former McCain campaign director Richard H. Davis, published in the Boston Globe in 2004.

The AAPC says that push polling typically has the five following characteristics:

1. Push pollers generally do not identify the name of their organization right away. They sometimes use a fake name to identify their organization. Legitimate pollers will identify themselves at the beginning of the call.
2. Push polls are not after a random sample of the population, but instead try to reach as many voters as possible.
3. Push polls are short: 30 to 60 seconds. Real opinion polls generally take from 5 to 30 minutes.
4. Push polls are designed to persuade voters about a particular point of view.
5. Legitimate polling firms do not conduct push polls.

Susan said the caller identified herself, when asked, as being an employee of the Maguire Group. I think this is most likely the McGuire Group. See Brian Dennert’s August 18 blog entry.

If Laura’s guess was right and Susan was the victim of a “push poll,” then whoever is backing this deserve our reproach. In the same article, Brian speculated that Waste Management might have been behind previous efforts at push polling.

If anyone out there knows about push polling in the state senate’s district 19 race or in any other local race, please post here. It would serve the people of this district to expose this deplorable practice and those who support it. I call on candidates of both parties to explicitly condemn it.