Push Pollers Heart Huckabee

It’s not much of a mystery which candidate the nonprofit group Common Sense Issues supports. After all, they run a website called Trust Huckabee. And they’ve made millions of calls in key primary states on Mike Huckabee’s behalf.

From the various reports, the automated calls are transparent examples of push polls — i.e. calls posing as polls, but really intended to give negative information about a particular candidate.

Common Sense has some considerable experience with this. In the 2006 elections, the group paid for calls attacking Democrats in at least five states. The robo calls followed their favored formula — extremely leading questions followed by a barrage of “facts.” In Maryland, voters were asked whether they supported medical research experiments on unborn babies. In Tennessee, voters were asked “Would you prefer to have your taxes not raised, and if possible, cut?” and then “Do you believe that foreign terrorists should have the same legal rights and privileges as American citizens?” You can listen to one of the Tennessee calls here. Always, the “facts” based on the voter’s response.

When I talked to one of the leaders of the group, he told me that the questions used “accurate characterizations,” and added: “There are a fair number of things that are unpleasant to talk about, but that doesn’t make [our questions] any less accurate.”

The group doesn’t mind pushing the envelope. Since December, they’ve paid for calls supporting Huckabee in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and South Carolina; because they are robo calls, they’ve been able to reach hundreds of thousands of households (1 million in South Carolina and Michigan each, and approximately 850,000 in Iowa). Florida is apparently next. The group also ran a TV ad in Iowa which you can see on their website called “Who Can You Trust?” Just in case voters didn’t get the message, they were directed to CannotTrustMittRomney.com, which includes a series of old TV clips of Romney proclaiming his pro-choice stance.*

The calls all seem to follow the same pattern. Voters are asked who they’re supporting, and then depending on their answer, they’re provided with a barrage of negative information about their chosen candidate (if it’s not Mike Huckabee). Huckabee himself has feebly protested the calls, saying that they “violate the spirit” of his campaign and “I wish they would stop.” Not suprisingly, Mike Hosenball of Newsweek reports that the major backers of the group are also supporters of Huckabee.

The calls have already gotten the group in trouble. Romney asked the Iowa attorney general to investigate the calls, and they’ve also come to the attention of the New Hampshire and South Carolina attorney generals. No one seems to be investigating the group yet, although the group is living dangerously in South Carolina, where not only is the Republican attorney general Henry McMaster co-chairman of John McCain’s state campaign, but there’s a law against automated phone calls. But the executive director of the group made it apparent that they’d already gamed this out:

Common Sense Issues’ Executive Director Patrick Davis has said the calls originate outside the state, are legal under federal law and amount to constitutionally protected free speech. “It’s all factual,” he said.

The group even has a defense of the calls up at TrustHuckabee.com, which argues that because the calls are based on voice-recognition technology and tailor their negative information based on the voter’s responses, they’re a-ok:

The type of calls that Common Sense Issues, Inc. is making into Iowa and New Hampshire are personalized educational conversations enabled by artificial intelligence. While some have suggested that these personalized conversations are “push polls,” they are not as each one is unique based on the individual. Push calls are designed to be a one-way communication. During a personalized educational call enabled by our voice recognition artificial intelligence technology a participant has a two-way dialogue.

They seem to be rather proud of this strategy and of the technology that allows them to make the calls. The calls are actually made by a company called ccAdvertising — a favorite company for shadowy third-party groups in the 2006 elections. The company can make at least 3.5 million calls per day.

When disclosing its activity to the Federal Election Commission, Common Sense has labeled all of the disbursements to ccAdvertising as “GOTV,” indicating that the calls serve the double purpose of distributing negative information about rival candidates and identifying Huckabee supporters to be rallied on election day.

*Note: Don’t miss the group’s recent ad against Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO), where he’s presented with a “Cuban propaganda award” from Fidel Castro: