Tales of a GOP Push-Pollster

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."