I HAVE THE INFO

So I got a call from an opinion polling firm on sunday night.  I spoke with 2 employees of the Western Watts company of (according to my caller ID, tele:9282683060.) Flagstaff Arizona.

I’ll admit that I knew pretty much immediately that I was getting push polled. I don’t know a solitary soul in Arizona and I had a recorded message call a few days prior from the McCain campaign inviting me a rally at the Constitution center.

For whatever reason, my household must be ID’d as potential swing voters. Which potentially means that whoever is doing the voter profiling and segment construction for PA voters for the McCain campaign maybe needs to get fired.

On the other hand, we live in a very working class area, and all of our local elected officials are republicans.  So maybe not.

Anyway, instead of hanging up, I figured getting push polled could be educational.  And maybe good for a blog post, but I’ll leave that up to you.

My phone mic from college is an ancient memory, so here is what I remember of the call:

I was asked a series of demogrpahic questions. age, family income, highest education level completed, etc.

I was asked if I had seen various ads by the McCain campaign and the Obama campaign.  The first couple I had seen or heard.

Then things started going the wrong way.(or right way depending on your perspective.)

The format for answers were typically:

More likely, less likely, no different.

Q:If you saw an ad in the National Journal, stating that Barack Obama was going to need to raise 1 trillion dollars in new taxes in order to pay for his proposed programs, how would this effect your vote?

There were several variations on this question, all rotating around the point that Obama plans to raise levy 1 trillion dollars in new taxes. including:

Q:If you saw an ad where Barack Obama said that he thought Joe the Plumber’s wealth should be ’spread around’ (or somesuch) would this make you more likely, less likley or have no effect on your vote?

Side note: I’d love to know if the script this woman read the questions from changed based on my household income.  I didn’t think to ask that.  I did stop the poll at one point to ask her if she knew who was paying for her to call me that night.  She said she did not, and immediately transferred me to her manager, a guy named ‘Mr. Reese’.

Mr. Reese claimed he couldn’t tell me who had paid the contract to make the call.  He said he didn’t know. I politely persisted in asking him for about 5 minutes until he told me that the contract was under something called ‘Target State Tracking’, a term so massively generic that googling it later got me nowhere.

I finished the poll after speaking with him.  There was a question about whether I had heard about Rep. Murtha calling Western PA voters racist. And another one in which I was asked, True or False, that I had heard neighbors say that they thought other folks in my nieghborhood would not vote for Barack Obama because he was black.

Creepy and weird.

So, in summary:  I got a call from someone asking my opinion, but instead of really being asked opinions, I was being given McCain campaign talking points about how Obama is going to raise my taxes.

They may have been trying to take the temperature of the area re:race as a voting factor, or maybe spreading fud about Obama’s viability as a candidate. See also the Bradley Effect.

Classic push polling.