Tales of a Push Pollster
News:
What’s in the Swift Boat crowd’s bag of last-minute tricks? Nonstop robo-calls, for starters. Meet one of the nation’s top GOP telemarketers.
October 26, 2006
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You may have gotten a call from Gabriel Joseph III already. It starts with one of those cheery robo-voices asking if you'll participate in a 45-second survey. If you don't slam the phone down at that point, you'll soon get to a question like this one: "In America when a person dies, the IRS can take up to 55 percent of the inheritance left for family and friends. Do you want Congress to permanently eliminate this unfair tax?" Next, you'll be told that the Democrat running for Congress in your district "voted to keep the death tax in place and refused to vote to make permanent the tax cuts that have caused record economic growth in 2001." At that point, you'll know that you're dealing with a "push poll"—one of the dirtier, yet mostly legal, tricks in a political operative's bag of last-minute campaign tools.
Push pollsters operate behind the scenes: They don't advertise their services, don't go on TV, and often can't be tracked as they hide behind dozens of aliases. The push polling firm that placed calls to voters in the South Carolina GOP primary in 2000, suggesting that John McCain had an out-of-wedlock child who was black, was never identified, though the calls may well have cost McCain that election.
It was all the more remarkable, then, when Gabriel Joseph outed himself and his firm in a legal battle in Indiana recently. Joseph's company had been doing "surveys" for the Economic Freedom Fund, a group bankrolled by Bob Perry of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth fame. When the fund was sued by the Indiana Attorney General's Office for violating a state anti-robo-calling statute, Joseph countersued; a judge ruled against him October 25.
Joseph's firm operates under at least a half dozen names. Most of the time, the company is called ccAdvertising, though it also goes by FreeEats.com as well as a range of less colorful aliases, including FEC Research, Political Research, and Election Research. The FreeEats moniker, Joseph says, is a hangover from the dot-com boom, when he was in the business of pushing web traffic to clients. Today, FreeEats does mostly political work. In November 2002, the company issued a press release claiming to have played a role in the "Republican force that swept America on November 5," noting that "no fewer than six winning candidates and one hot ballot referendum were influenced" by its efforts.
The key to FreeEats' success has been automation—it has developed proprietary robo-calling software that responds to people's answers and records them. It's similar to the technology used by firms that peddle satellite TV or preapproved mortgage loans; some genuine political polling outfits, such as Rasmussen and Survey USA, also use robo-calls. "Previously, this could have been done only by using live callers," Joseph said in 2002. "But we've automated it, making the process far more efficient and cost-effective, which saves the candidates invaluable time and much-needed funds." Joseph estimates he can handle 3.5 million calls per day, each one costing less than 15 cents.
Dave Johnson, a fellow at the Commonweal Institute, a progressive think tank based in California, says push polls are among the most effective forms of political messaging, far more persuasive even than TV spots. "People are inclined to believe you when they think they're getting a poll," he explains. "It immediately adds credibility to what they're hearing." Push pollsters also identify voters' party preferences—information that can then be used in get-out-the-vote campaigns. Just how successful these tactics are is a matter of some debate, but according to Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, they certainly have an effect. "Even if they change just 1 percent of the vote, that's a close election margin," he told me in an email. Nancy Mathiowetz, the president-elect of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says that with the use of robo-calling, "we've seen a proliferation of push polling this year, because it's relatively cheap."
Business has certainly been booming for FreeEats, which has deployed its technology on behalf of conservative candidates and causes ranging from the National Rifle Association and the anti-immigration Minutemen to Tom DeLay, who paid the firm $24,101 for telemarketing work between November 2005 and February 2006. DeLay's ally Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, has hired FreeEats to push his antitax agenda, including an unsuccessful effort to prevent a tax increase in Colorado.
FreeEats has also become the go-to firm for conservative groups fighting to restrict gay marriage and abortion, both issues that are dear to the company's chairman, Donald P. Hodel—a longtime Washington insider who served in two Cabinet posts (secretary of the interior and of energy) during the Reagan administration, then went on to become president of both the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family. (Mother Jones' calls to Hodel's home in Silverthorne, Colorado, went unanswered.) In 2004, FreeEats was commissioned by the Defense of Marriage Coalition to promote a referendum banning gay marriage in Oregon. During the company's telephone surveys, Oregon residents reported being told: "In Massachusetts, where court-ordered same-sex marriage is legal, they are now preparing materials to teach the gay lifestyle to children, beginning in kindergarten." The referendum passed by a 14-point margin.
This time around, FreeEats has placed calls in 49 states, according to court filings. Among its clients is the Economic Freedom Fund, a political committee run out of the Sacramento law firm of Charles H. Bell Jr., who is also the general counsel to California's Republican Party. The fund, founded in August, is almost entirely financed by Perry, the Texas real-estate magnate and friend of Karl Rove's, who has donated a total of $5 million to the group.
