pudge's Journal: Push Polling

I think maybe I was just push polled.

I was asked a long series of questions about various candidates for office in WA, and then given a bunch of positive statements about the Democrat candidate for Attorney General, Deborah Senn, and asked to respond to each whether it was convincing.

At that point -- these questions went on for a few minutes -- I was fairly convinced it was positive push polling. But then they gave me some negative statements about Senn. OK, so maybe not. And then some negative statements about her Republican opponent, Rob McKenna.

The tally was about 5 positive statements and 3 negative about Senn, and 3 negative about McKenna. No positive statements about McKenna. So maybe it was some positive push polling for Senn. (For the record, I told the pollster I had no strong reaction to any of the given statements about any of the candidates, positive or negative. I don't tend to be swayed by short marketing phrases. :-)

Now, it could be that the pollster just wasn't very good. He got a bunch of the names wrong (he never once said Mark Sidran's name properly), and he botched many of the questions (trying, but failing, to say "accreditation"). So maybe he just made a mistake.

Also, I wouldn't guess push polls would last this long (>10 minutes). So I dunno.

I was waiting for the question about my race ... that came at the end, and I, of course, refused to answer it.

The other question I didn't answer was whether I thought the state was headed in the right direction. My answer is, "if Dino Rossi gets elected governor, then yes; if not, no." But that wasn't one of the options.

Might be interesting...

[Sheetrock]

To see if you can get future callers to tell you on whose behalf the polling is being done, what company they're working for, or their location.

I don't know if any would divulge that sort of information, but maybe you could float that you're an independent journalist running an informal survey of your own and have them tell you this stuff at the end of the survey if they're uncomfortable about skewing results. Used to get into interesting conversations with commercial solicitors before the Do Not Call li

perfect example of push polling

[jefe289]

Down here in So. Cal, my representative sent me an email showing results of his "polling" effort in my locale/district.

Link [house.gov]

If you look at ANY of the questions, you can see he only gives any support behind one side of the issue. Look at the 1st question: There is no information as to why the people were protesting. As it turns out, agents were camped outside of schools [dailybulletin.com]. Look at the last question: why would anybody be against the patriot act? No mention of it. Irritating, isn't it?

Re:perfect example of push polling

[jefe289]

Well, I guess questions 1 & 5 are the most egregious. Questions 2-4 don't really provide any data, so I can't say they're as biased.