September 18, 2004
Forums, Endorsements, And Other Things (Plus A Final Word On Polls)
Your Weekend General Election Campaign Update
A fairly rapid sequence of links this time around, followed by a more involved follow-up on a previous matter. Between the original item out of a City Council candidates debate we need to get written, and the recovery we need to suffer after the utterly embarassing defeat of the Boston Red Sox today, that's all we can manage for the update that's due.
This past Thursday in The Oregonian, the Business section offered an article on candidate forums held by the manufacturing and real estate sectors, broken into segments on schools, work-force training, taxes and regulation, and access.
Also on Thursday, The Portland Mercury reported on the latest You Promised! forum on parks and the environment. We do happen to have a fair amount of notes from this event, but to be honest we came away from it with the sense that there wasn't much there that voters couldn't get simply by looking at the list of promises provided by each candidate.
Earlier this week, the Tom Potter campaign announced their candidate had been endorsed by the Multnomah County Democratic Central Committee, while the Jim Francesconi campaign began airing another new radio ad featuring the principal of Woodmere Elementary School.
Friday's "City Matters" column took a look at the voters pamphlet and Mayoral transition teams, among other items.
And finally, a brief follow-up to the opinion poll controversy we got ourselves into a little bit ago.
When all is said and done, our one regret is in wrapping the very specific term "push poll" around the situation. Partly, this was just poor reporting, and partly it was caught in our broader rhetorical point about negative issues being raised in polls of any kind.
Strictly speaking, actual push polls are almost never presented to the world as polls, but serve a semi-background function as a telephone-based smear campaign. As near as anyone can tell, that's not what was going on in this case. However, we do reiterate our position -- as contrary to the norms and accepted wisdom in "everybody does it" political circles as it may be -- that polling to see how negatives might play to the public is cheap and dirty. If you're willing to go negative, just have the cajones to come out and do it and let the chips fall where they may in terms of public reaction.
In the end, if anyone out there knows for certain what campaign was polling these particular questions, it isn't us. So here's your disclaimer for the remainder of this item: Nothing we are about to say should imply that we know anything for certain, and conceivably should be taken with a grain of salt and viewed with a skeptical eye. What we offer from here on out we offer because it offers a look at what campaigns do and do not do, and/or say they do and do not do.
We have at this point seen the poll that the Sam Adams campaign was running on September 1 and 2. Or, rather, we've seen the first sixteen questions, since the later items which reportedly asked about positive and negative aspects of both Adams and his opponent Nick Fish weren't provided to us, nor were we given any indication of what those questions were. On the other hand, and for whatever the statement is worth to any of you, we were told that the Adams campaign doesn't ask anything for which they don't claim to have some sort of evidence.
Whether or not that somewhat sidelong statement to us was an admission that the questions previously disavowed by the Adams campaign were in fact asked by them, we have no idea. But they also were not re-denied when specifically raised in our last conversation with them. Instead, we were simply told the above: That they never ask questions (about their own candidate or their opponent) for which they don't at least claim to have some sort of proof.
And, of course, we were told what everyone tells us: Everybody does it, and it's just part of how polling works. In fact, we were specifically told that the Adams campaign did not want all of the world of polling to get a bad reputation and linked to the very specific negative campaign tactic of actual push polling.
In part, this is a response to the fact that the Fish campaign included in a newsletter item the statement: "As was reported on Portland Communique, Adams' poll may have contained some rather "pushy" negative questions about Nick that could easily skew results."
To be fair, we never quite reported this. What we reported was that a poll asking about negatives reportedly was being conducted, and the Adams campaign denied it was theirs. Unfortunately, and also to be fair, because we got carried away with the use of the "push poll" terminology, things got a little out of control.
So everyone will just have to have their own opinions as to who was asking the particular questions in the poll we reported, just as everyone will have to have their own opinions as to whether or not campaigns should ever poll about negatives. We, as stated, happen to have a more stringent view of this particular aspect of the political machine than, it seems, most people do. But as far as we're concerned, one doesn't poll about negatives at all unless one thinks they might perhaps be of some use to you in the campaign. And, again as stated, we find that cheap, and we find it dirty.
Yes, everybody does it. It's entirely conceivable that all four remaining City campaigns underway in the general election have done it. That doesn't mean we have to take the practice quietly -- although it does mean we should be more careful to not use specific terminology such as "push poll" to describe the normal and (unfortunately) accepted practice of asking about candidate negatives.
So, the overly-encompassing use of the term we reget. Our opinion as to poll questions about candidate negatives, however, we do not.