Greg Sargent had an interesting report yesterday afternoon about Mark Penn, the pollster for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and a message-testing poll he has in the field right now.
The story started when Jason Eness-Potter, an Iowa resident, said he received a call from Penn’s polling firm. Greg followed up with him about the questions on the survey, which began with generic inquiries — candidate preferences, opinion of Bush — but quickly veered into negative questions about Clinton’s rivals.
According to Eness-Potter, the interviewer hit him with a negative line about Obama’s Iraq stance. “It was, `He claims to promise an end to the Iraq War, yet after making these statements he voted to continue the war,'” Eness-Potter summarized. This apparently is a reference to Iraq war supplementals Obama supported. A second negative line dealt with Obama’s inexperience. “He says he’ll bring new energy, but he’s only served in the Senate for two years,” Eness-Potter summarized.
On Edwards, he says, the first question was on the $400 haircut. He quoted it as follows: “John Edwards proudly promotes himself as a champion of the poor, and yet he went and got a $400 haircut,” before continuing with the customary refrain of whether that made the respondent more or less likely to approve of Edwards.
Now, I’ve seen quite a bit of criticism of this, with several people calling this a “push poll.” I don’t think that’s right. A push poll is generally understood to be a fake poll — a campaign wants to get a message out, so they call voters pretending to be conducting a poll, when in fact it’s just delivering an attack.
From what I can tell, this wasn’t a push poll; it was a message-testing poll. The campaign wants to know what kinds of criticisms are effective, so they’re asking people what they think of various issues. To accuse the Clinton team of engaging in push polling is to accuse them of using an underhanded, unethical attack. Given what we know, that’s probably unfair in this case.
But that doesn’t mean the poll was entirely kosher, either.
What the poll tells us is where the Clinton campaign is prepared to go, if necessary. The senator has been consistent about not going negative on her campaign rivals, which is good. But she’s also polling about John Edwards’ expensive haircut, which is not good.
Put it this way: why test a message about Edwards’ haircut in the first place? The results will show whether voters actually care about the issue, but so what? This isn’t a road that Democratic candidates should be prepared to go down anyway, so there’s no reason to even put the poll question in the field.
Realistically, are Edwards and Obama message-testing through polling? Probably. Are they measuring responses on anti-Clinton criticisms? Probably. Is all of this just a necessarily evil of modern presidential campaigning in a competitive primary? Sure.
But a) Clinton has derided this style of politicking; and b) she got caught.
How can you tell that this is an embarrassment for the Clinton campaign? Some of the best communications/media professionals in the Democratic Party work for this campaign, and for 24 hours, they’ve had no comment on this story. Sometimes silence says quite a bit.