Speak of the devil
Just as I was saying the NY-29 race had stayed pretty clean so far, I’m getting unconfirmed reports that the Kuhl campaign is doing some “push polling”. Push polling is a technique whereby someone calls pretending to be a pollster or typical phone banker and then asks questions like “if you knew that so-and-so drank the blood of dead puppies, would you still support him.” What I’m hearing is that the Kuhl campaign is calling and saying something along the lines of “if you knew that Eric Massa was against secure borders would you still support him?”.
Push polling is a nasty — dare I say it, Rovian — tactic. The Bush campaign famously used it against John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 to insinuate that McCain had fathered a black child with a prostitute (a perversion of the real-life fact that McCain and his wife adopted a south Asian child).
If you get any calls that sound like push polls, let us know!
Related posts:
[...] Yesterday, I mentioned that we’re getting reports that the Kuhl campaign is doing some push polling. Unfortunately, what we’ve heard so far isn’t detailed (the people hung up and didn’t have caller ID). It would be terrific if one of you out there were to get one of these push polls and were to: (1) write down exactly what was being said, (2) get the caller ID of the group making the calls (it’s likely that they aren’t coming directly from Kuhl campaign offices or phone banks), and (3) report all of this back to us via the comments or the “contact us” link. [...]