What Exactly Is A Push Poll, Anyway?
Yesterday we brought you word that it looked as if some unnamed Republicans were “push-polling” Kirsten Gillibrand, the Dem challenger to incumbent GOP Rep. John Sweeney. In response, a number of readers wrote in to protest that the process we described wasn’t push-polling, but a more routine effort to test the potential value of negative arguments against Gillibrand. So we checked in with Mickey Carroll, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, and asked: What is a push poll, exactly? Carroll told us that the primary thing which distinguishs a push poll is the motive of the pollster. He said that if the pollster calls voters with the goal of influencing the person being called, rather than to elicit information, then the pollster is push-polling. “It’s when you provide negative information to a caller that might change his opinion,” Carroll says. “The classic definition of a push poll is when you say you are running a poll but what you’re really doing is trying to
