Push-polling: It irritates voters, and contains questions that attempt to change voter opinions. It is geared to “push” the candidates away from whomever they are rooting for and pull them towards the payee of the poll. Or, as stated “push polling is campaigning under the guise of research.”
The push-poll is essentially a testing ground for campaigning, and by asking certain questions in various degrees, the poll-givers can determine what sort of campaigns their client should run. A smear campaign? This-is-what-you-wanted-to-hear?
However, these polls are legitimate, fact-based, and essentially true. But once again, this is sampled on any strange limited size of people- all clustered in one area, or otherwise unevenly, or spread too thin… and even balanced surveys “disseminate negative information.”
A second and more dangerous type of survey (occasionally referred to as deliberative polling) involves exaggeration and/or falsification in order to produce a favorable result for the (client) candidate. When lucky, this creates a bandwagon effect. Mainly, this is all achieved through spoon-feeding negative information about the opponent.
The third kind of polling is known as “advocacy phoning” or “negative persuasion”. It’s not actually polling, as it is directed towards as many members of a target population as possible. This is all about going against the opposing candidate- if the called is already voting for the client, call ended; if the called says the opponent, they are spoon fed negative information.
There is also positive phoning (a process in which random people really are selected to hear all the good things about a given candidate), but it’s a wee on the extinct side. Or, let us say that it is being constantly being supplanted by more negative polling.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm sorry if it's too short- feel free to ask or comment- please let me know if I missed something!
