My first "push poll" experience
I've heard of them before, but this is the first time I've experienced a push poll in the run-up to an election. After a series of innocuous questions on current issues and my opinions about various national political figures, I started getting a long litany of "descriptions" of "positions" that our current Congressman, Richard Pombo, has taken.
The interesting thing was that several of the statements covered legislation or government initiatives that I knew a fair bit about (drilling rights on federal lands, search procedures at ports and airports, Medicare reform...). The statements were clearly false, and were intended to put Pombo in the most negative possible light. After each group of five or six such statements, the poll taker asked if I'd be more or less likely to vote for Pombo, or for his likely Democratic opponent, Jerry McNerney. By the end of this relatively boorish attack job, I was a much more enthusiastic Pombo supporter than I'd been at the beginning.
Since the general election is still almost 9 months away, chances are the poll wasn't a true push poll, but a variant that is used by a candidate to test negative messages out for future use in campaign ads. The amazing thing was how bad and blatantly false many of the allegations were. If McNerney wants to unseat Pombo (not likely, the 11th CD is a pretty safe GOP seat), he'll have to come up with something better than this crude hatchet job.