Push poll
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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. The term is also sometimes used incorrectly to refer to legitimate polls which test political messages, some of which may be negative. Push polling has been condemned by the American Association of Political Consultants.
The mildest forms of push polling are designed merely to remind voters of a particular issue. For instance, a push poll might ask respondents to rank candidates based on their support of abortion in order to get voters thinking about that issue.
More negative are attacks on another candidate by using polls. These attacks often contain information with little or no basis in fact.
One way to distinguish between push polling as a tactic and polls which legitimately seek information is the sample size. Genuine polls make do with small, representative samples, whereas push polls can be very large, like any other mass marketing effort.
True push polls tend to be very short, with only a handful of questions, so as to make as many calls as possible. Any data obtained (if used at all) is secondary in importance to negatively impacting the targeted candidate. Legitimate polls are often used by candidates to test potential messages. They frequently ask about both positive and negative statements about all major candidates in an election and always ask demographic information at the end.
Perhaps the most famous alleged use of push polls is in the 2000 United States Republican Party primaries, when it was alleged that George W. Bush's campaign used push polling to torpedo the campaign of Senator John McCain. Voters in South Carolina reportedly were asked "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?", an allegation that had no substance, but planted the idea of undisclosed allegations in the minds of thousands of primary voters[1]. McCain and his wife had in fact adopted a Bangladeshi girl.
The main advantage of push polls is that they are an effective way of maligning an opponent ("pushing" voters away) while avoiding responsibility for the distorted or false information used in the push poll. They are risky for the same reason: if credible evidence emerges that the polls were ordered by a campaign, it would do serious damage to that campaign. Push polls are also relatively expensive, having a far higher cost per voter than radio or television commercials. Thus push polls are most effective in elections with fewer voters, such as party primaries, or in close elections where a relatively small change in votes can mean victory or loss.
Push polling can also take place outside the party-political landscape. For example, in August, 2006, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) used a push poll on its website, mymoviemuse.com, that attempted to sway the public towards the MPAA's own opinion of the concept of copyright [2]. One question asked, "How would you feel if you painted a picture and found out someone was selling copies of it on EBay [sic] and making money off it?" The possible answers were, "Violated, quiet, angry, appreciated, glad, indifferent, concerned, relieved, annoyed, other."
Another angle on push polling is the practice of providing less than the full complement of possible answers in the available response choices, or by structuring the poll question in such a way that the response is limited in a some way thus biasing the poll by excluding legitimate responses and exaggerating the real level of support for the choices given. In the political context, this is most often done by such actions as limiting the respondent to choosing between the "two major parties", thus artificially steering the public into thinking only of the two parties that are listed and ignoring the existence of the possibility of electing a minor party. This has been so effective in western democracies that they do indeed tend to have only two major parties, whereas in a well functioning healthy democracy there would statistically be expected to be many more with a fairly even distribution of support, although this phenomenon could also be explained by Duverger's law instead.
