Huckabee robo-dials NH voters with push poll... even Democrats!

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Dec 16, 2007 8:00 PM EST

Linked to groups: Rockingham/Strafford DFA

Mike Huckabee is making push poll calls in NH as well as Iowa... or at least something named "Common Sense on the Issues" is making them on his behalf. These are positive push polls... if you say you're not voting for Huckabee, you are (if you don't hang up first) eventually subjected to a series of what would seem like positive talking points if you were a rightwinger. (To a leftist like me, they mostly sounded bad, aside from the fact that he recently renewed his vows to his wife of 30 years.) The call came from someone or something called "PS 07" @ 703-378-2990. I don't know why they contacted me, since Timothy Horrigan is a somewhat well-known partisan Democrat.

I am a Democrat but I lied to the robo-caller (which may not have been even recording my "Yes" or "No" answers after the point where I said Yes, I would vote in the primary and No, I would not vote for Huckabee.) It is definitely a blatantly pro-Huckabee push poll. It even claimed that he was a tax cutter, even though I personally favor putting government back on a pay as you go basis, which unfortunately means financing government by taxation rather than borrowing.

The caller ID claimed the call came from an organization called "PS 07" located in the 703 (Northern Virginia) area code... although the contact number given if you listened through the whole call was in the 719 (Colorado Springs) area code.

The only reason I lied and said I was a Republican was to skew the pole by saying I was voting for someone ridiculous like Tom Tancredo or Duncan Hunter... but they only asked about Giuliani, Thompson, Romney & Huckabee... they didn't even mention Ron Paul!

It is possible Thompson's people made the calls, since my phone number is in his database under a fake name. Hell, it could be any of the other 3 establishment GOP frontrunners. But it is more likely to be Huckabee. In fact, I am 98% sure that the campaign was directly involved, because they fired about 20 talking points at me. If it was a dirty trick, there would have been something inflammatory mixed in, like an attack on another candidate or a blatantly bizarre proposal. (Well, the call did say that a "Fair Tax", i.e., a nationals sales or value-added tax, would allow for the abolishment of the IRS, which is absurd. But that is an absurd belief which is shared by many Republicans. It's not as if the robo-call threw in the factoid that Huckabee thinks the earth is 6000 years old or anything of that nature.) If this was a totally spontaneous third-party effort, it seems to me that the pitch would have emphasized just one or two points instead of firing off the headlines of a whole stack of issue papers in 45 seconds.

(Push polling actually was at one time a semi-legitimate research tool. Back in the days before
caller ID and the internet, I did calls for... well I will just say it was someone who ran for President during the pre-Clinton era. We tested not just potential smears against our opponents but also
smears which we expected our opponents to make against us. We would gage the respondent's position on the campaign, test a pro- whoever or anti-whoever message on them, and then re-gage their response. Usually, the message made no difference at all.)

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Location: NH