Fascinating news from Sam Seidel:
Someone (either the Kerry Healey campaign or a supporter) is paying an out-of-state firm for a negative “push poll” to cast rival Democratic candidate Deval Patrick in a negative light….
I received such a call on September 21 from a polling firm that claimed to be out of state, and the telephone pollster claimed to have no knowlege of the candidates he was calling about. My caller ID identified the company as “Venture Data3” and lists a (541) area code. When I call the number, I get no connection.
Venture Data is a company based out of Salt Lake City, though (541) area codes come from Oregon. Venture Data lists “employment opportunities” [link added –ed.] both in Salt Lake City and in their Eugene, Oregon office, area code (541).
The pollster started with a series of innocuous questions, and then, 10 minutes into the poll, began to ask a series of questions designed to “see if these impact your view of the candidates”. All the questions asked concerned Deval Patrick. Unfortunately, the only one one I recall went to the effect: “If you knew that Deval Patrick had been referred to as a ‘quota king’ in one of his previous jobs, would this impact your view of the candidate?”
First, a bit of debunking: as I showed here, the only people who ever “referred to” Deval Patrick as a “quota king” were conservative activist and anti-affirmative action zealot Clint Bolick, who tried unsuccessfully to defeat Patrick’s nomination to the Clinton Justice Department with the same tactics he had used to beat back Lani Guinier’s, and right-wing columnist Jeff Jacoby (who needs no further introduction). Bolick came up with the moniker “quota queen” for Guinier, and although it was totally unjustified, it stuck. But he failed with Patrick; the moniker never caught on, and Patrick was confirmed by the Senate.
A “push poll” is
a political campaign technique in which an individual or organization attempts to influence or alter the view of respondents under the guise of conducting a poll. Push polls are generally viewed as a form of negative campaigning…. Any data obtained (if used at all) is secondary in importance to negatively impacting the targeted candidate.
Since, as we know, the “quota king” label as applied to Patrick is completely a fabrication of Clint Bolick and the right-wing smear machine, the “poll” Seidel describes qualifies as a “push poll” under that definition. Interestingly, the fact that Venture Data has found it necessary to post a statement along the lines of “Good heavens, we would never conduct a push poll!” certainly suggests that this issue has arisen for Venture Data in the past. The pollster, methinks, doth protest too much.
Pretty slimy. Has anyone else gotten these calls? If you do, let them ask their questions and try to take notes – get as much info as you can. And let’s try to figure out who’s behind them.
One more interesting footnote: alert reader gary has noted that the “quota king” label has been written into Deval Patrick’s wikipedia bio. Someone who knows more about working with wikipedia than I do needs to take a good hard look at that whole entry and make sure that every last word in it is accurate and well sourced – and needs to fix it if it’s not.
UPDATE: Turns out there’s a whole lotta push-polling going on. BMG user jakebeal reports the following:
FYI: My wife just recieved a call from an outfit called “Call Research” conducting a Republican push-poll.
After some normal questions, they started rapid-fire dirt, starting with “When working for the US Government, Deval Patrick got two cop-killers off the hook. Would that make you more or less likely to vote for him?” and getting uglier from there.
I don’t know how wide-spread this push-poll is, but figured that people ought to be aware of its existence, and the firm that’s doing it.
Anyone else? Post details here.
