Another day, another "push poll" story. This time, Politico's
Jonathan Martin reports
on an "apparent push poll" in Iowa
involving a "research firm" that "called Iowa Republicans this week
praising John McCain and criticizing Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith." AP's Phillip
Elliot traced
the calls to:
Western Wats, a Utah-based
company, placed the calls that initially sound like a poll but then pose
questions that cast Romney in a harsh light, according to those who received
the calls.
Elliot then leaps to the same quick shortcut that tempts all
to many reporters:
In politics, this type of phone
surveying is called "push polling" - contacting potential voters and
asking questions intended to plant a message in voters' minds, usually
negative, rather than gauging peoples' attitudes.
No it's
not. The information
described in the reports by Martin and Elliot sounds more like a form of
message testing done by a real pollster - not the classic "push poll" dirty
trick, although that distinction does not absolve the pollster from ethical
responsibility for the content of their questions.
In writing about
this issue I have tried to distinguish between the classic so-called "push
poll," which is not a poll at all. It has no "sample" (in any statistical
sense), no data collected, no analysis. It just amounts to someone making phone
calls to spread a nasty rumor under the guise of a survey.
What confuses everyone is that campaign pollsters routinely
conduct surveys that test campaign messages and try to simulate the dialogue of
a real campaign. That message testing can often involve negative information. As
Guiliani pollster Ed Goeas told John Martin:
"When you're doing a research call
you ask positive and negative questions on [your own candidate] and positive
and negative questions on [your opponents]," he said. "You're trying
to war-game."
In this case, the calls apparently came from a survey call
center known as Western Wats that acts as a vendor for many legitimate pollsters
and survey researchers. The calls reported were part of a longer interview. Elliot
included this account from one respondent:
The first 15 or 20 questions were
general questions about the leading candidates," she said. "Then he
started asking me very, very negatively phrased questions about Romney. The
first one was would you have a more favorable, less favorable, blah, blah,
blah, impression of Mitt Romney if you knew that his five sons
had never served in the military and that he considered working on a
presidential campaign as public service or some such question.
Based on those descriptions, these calls sounds like some
sort of "message testing." But tossing aside the "push poll" label does not absolve
the pollster of ethical responsibility. At a minimum, as the statement by the
American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) puts it:
[Message testing] surveys should be
judged by the same ethical standards as any other poll of the public: Do they
include any false or misleading statements? Do they treat the respondent with
fairness and respect?
The respondents quoted in the two news stories were certainly
disturbed and angered by the questions they heard. Consider also the details
these respondents remembered. Martin passes on the report of one respondent:
"Statements were on baptizing
the dead, the Book of Mormon being on the level of the Bible, and one about
equating it to a cult," said the Iowan, deeming them "common
criticisms of Mormonism."
AP's Elliot added:
Among the questions was whether a
resident knew that Romney was a Mormon, that he received military deferments
when he served as a Mormon missionary in France, that his five sons did not
serve in the military, that Romney's faith did not accept blacks as bishops
into the 1970s and that Mormons believe the Book
of Mormon is superior to the Bible.
One thing we can say without jumping to any conclusions
about who may be responsible: No campaign has made these sorts of statements or
attacks openly, and the organization that paid Western
Watts to make the calls has so far been unwilling to take
responsibility for the survey. So even if these calls were part of real survey,
even if the information was narrowly factual in some sense, the refusal of the sponsors
to accept responsibility for testing it speaks volumes about the ethics of the
test itself.
Yes, campaigns (and independent groups) have the right to
privately consider strategies they ultimately decide not to pursue. But when the
market research for those potential strategies touches hundreds (or thousands) of
volunteer respondents with a message that deeply offends, and when the
organizations that sponsor the research hide behind a cloak of secrecy,
something is very wrong regardless of the label we use to describe it.