PoliticalMANIPULATIVE

Push Polling

What it is

Telemarketing disguised as opinion research: calls or messages that pose as a survey but exist to deliver a damaging, often false, claim about a candidate to as many voters as possible, with no intention of measuring anything.

How it works

Genuine polls ask questions to learn answers; a push poll asks questions to plant premises. The call opens as a survey, which lowers the listener's guard, and then delivers its payload in the form of a question: would you be more or less likely to support the candidate if you knew that he had done X? The listener processes the presupposition whether or not the claim is true, exactly as Wegner and colleagues (1981) found for innuendo in question form, and the caller never has to assert anything. The distinguishing features, as the American Association for Public Opinion Research describes them, are scale and intent: real message-testing polls survey a few hundred people with long questionnaires and record the answers, while push polls contact tens of thousands with one or two questions and record nothing. The disguise also launders the sponsor, since the calls are rarely traceable to a campaign. The tell is a survey that is very short, very negative, very widely received, and uninterested in what you think.

Real-world examples

  • •During the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary, voters received calls asking whether they would be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate Black child — a reference to his adopted daughter from Bangladesh; the sponsor of the calls was never established, and the Bush campaign denied involvement.
  • •In November 2007, Republican voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina received calls from the firm Western Wats that raised Mitt Romney's Mormon faith in negative terms under the guise of a survey; the client was never publicly identified.
  • •In the 1994 Florida governor's race, the campaign of Democrat Lawton Chiles acknowledged after the election that it had paid for tens of thousands of calls to elderly voters, presented as coming from independent seniors' groups, warning that Jeb Bush would cut Social Security and Medicare — attack calls in the same family, and the subject of a state legislative inquiry.
  • •The commercial cousin is known in market research as sugging, selling under the guise of research, in which a survey call turns into a sales pitch; industry codes prohibit it for the same reason survey researchers condemn push polls — it destroys public willingness to answer real questions.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●Presenting persuasion as research deceives the listener about the nature of the interaction and damages the credibility of every legitimate survey.
  • ●Campaigns that test negative messages in genuine polls should keep samples small, questions balanced, and results recorded; volume and one-sidedness are what turn testing into pushing.
  • ●Any negative claim delivered by a campaign, in a poll or otherwise, must be true and sourced; the question form does not lower that obligation.

How to defend against it

  • ►Ask the caller who is sponsoring the survey, what organization is conducting it, and how many people are being called; legitimate pollsters answer all three, and push pollers hang up.
  • ►Notice the structure: a real survey asks many questions about many topics and wants your answer; a call that asks one loaded question about one candidate and does not care what you say is not a poll.
  • ►Treat the premise inside the question as an unsourced accusation and check it laterally before it settles in — the Wegner finding means it has already nudged you.
  • ►Report the call to the state election authority or a party office and to AAPOR, with the number and the script if you noted it; sponsors are exposed when enough recipients compare notes.
  • ►When a campaign complains of being push-polled, apply the same standard: ask for the script and the reach before accepting the accusation, since claiming victimhood is itself a tactic.

From the Defense Playbook

"Why Do You Ask?"seconds

Answer an intrusive, oddly specific, or out-of-place question with a friendly question of your own about its purpose, which buys time, reveals intent, and breaks the reflex to answer simply because you were asked.

State Your Position Firstminutes

Before engaging with objections, questions, or someone else's summary of your view, say in one or two plain sentences what you actually hold and what you do not, so that the discussion is about your position and not a version built for you.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

  1. American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) (2007). AAPOR Statement on Push Polls. American Association for Public Opinion Research
    The professional definition distinguishing push polls from legitimate message-testing surveys by scale and intent.
  2. Sabato, L. J., & Simpson, G. R. (1996). Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics. Times Books
    Documented push-polling and disguised attack-call cases from 1990s campaigns of both parties.
  3. Traugott, M. W., & Lavrakas, P. J. (2008). The Voter's Guide to Election Polls (4th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield
    How to distinguish genuine polls from push polls as a recipient.
  4. Wegner, D. M., Wenzlaff, R., Kerker, R. M., & Beattie, A. E. (1981). Incrimination through innuendo: Can media questions become public answers?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(5), 822–832 · link
    Accusations in question form damage reputations nearly as much as direct assertions.
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