When push comes to poll.

• Author: Sabato, Larry J.
• Position: Negative telephone calling in political campaigns

Oh, the talephone is now a very evil technique.

--Republican pollster Frank Lunttz, November 1994

The one thing I see repeatedly is the total abuse of phone.

It's really running rampant and getting worse

--Democratic consultant Joe Trippi, August 1995

It was January, and Steve Forbes was riding high on flat tax fever. Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News featured him on their covers; he led the polls in Iowa. Then suddenly, like a political Hindenburg, Forbes was crashing and burning. As the caucuses drew near, polls showed a remarkable slide in his support.

At the same time, Forbes headquarters started receiving curious reports from supporters--reports of phone calls trashing the publishing scion. Some callers claimed to be conducting a poll, others just spewed criticism--of Forbes's flat tax plan or his position on gays in the military--and hung up. Some claimed to be from "National Market Research," others from a group called "Iowa's Farm Families." Some gave no identification at all.

Forbes knew he'd been ambushed, but there wasn't much he could do without any hard evidence. He called a press conference to allege that Senator Bob Dole, the putative but weak front-runner, was behind the telephone tricks. But Dole and his handlers flatly denied it. Indeed, the Senate majority leader went so far as to suggest that Forbes had caught some of Ross Perot's famed paranoia. Added campaign manager Scott Reed, "Forbes is attempting to muddy the waters by falsely accusing the Dole campaign and other candidates of making anonymous telephone calls attacking him."

Having beaten back Forbes's insurgency, Dole went on to win an underwhelming but nonetheless crucial two-percentage-point victory in the caucuses.

But when they denied the dirty tricks campaign, Dole and his staff either were misinformed or weren't telling the truth. Hearing Forbes's allegations against Dole, a political columnist for the Springfield, Illinois, Journal-Register named Bernard Schoenburg followed up some tips about a "boiler room" operation in town said to be working for Bob Dole. Schoenburg soon found a number of people, including homeless people and refugees from the fast food industry, who gave detailed accounts of making calls for the Dole campaign at $6 an hour. A few weeks later, The Wall Street Journal matched Schoenburg's initial report with Dole campaign records showing more than $1 million in payments to a somewhat notorious New York City telemarketing firm, Campaign Tel Ltd. The head of the firm admitted to conducting a massive negative phoning campaign on Dole's behalf. Interviews with employees and corporate documents indicate that at least 10,000 calls were made to Iowa alone, and that Campaign Tel ran similar operations in New Hampshire and other key primary states.

Confronted with this new evidence two weeks after the caucuses, the Dole campaign admitted a negative phoning campaign. But spokeswoman Christina Martin insisted to the Journal that the calls "amounted to messages that have mirrored our television commercials." She offered no explanation for the blanket denials issued originally.

During every campaign season, a great deal of attention is properly devoted to condemning misleading television advertisements and nasty direct mail. But the telephone is now the primary means for delivering underhanded and anonymous attacks in political campaigns. This explosion in negative phoning--called "push polling"--has largely been ignored, even though it has become the rage in American campaigns, to the detriment of both civility and the truth. The push poll operates under the guise of legitimate survey research to spread lies, rumors, and innuendo about candidates. Hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of voters were telephoned and push polled during the 1994 elections. This effort dramatically increased the negativity in American politics.

Many voters and observers are disgusted and enraged by this tactic, but sleaze telephoning can work efficiently and effectively. Unless exposed and checked, it is bound to become standard ammunition in campaign arsenals across the United States. Only a sharp, sustained rebuke from the press and an informed public bent on punishing the perpetrators can stop the swift spread of this campaign cancer.

Reach Out and Slime Someone

A push poll is a survey instrument containing questions that attempt to change the opinion of contacted voters, generally by divulging negative information about the opponent. In other words, it's campaigning under the guise of research.

Some forms of push polling are legitimate. The most common and defensible practice is an adjunct to "opposition research," efforts to learn about opponents' records and discover what might reduce public support for them. Commonly, a pollster working for a candidate will pre-test positive and negative campaign themes--including some blemishes that may not yet be publicly known. The information contained in research-oriented push polls is fact-based and essentially true (even if presented in a blunt and exaggerated partisan style).

A second type of push poll--the "agenda-driven survey"--is intended to produce a favorable result for the client-candidate, so that potential contributors and the press can...