Heard from Karen McCormick, a voter in the Hillsborough District 1 race featuring Brad Swanson vs. Rose Ferlita who was outraged and e-mailed me:

Just got an interesting phone call from "Basswood Research," â€¦ who claimed to be doing a public opinion survey.

When I indicated that I would vote for Rose, they asked me a string of derogatory questions skewed to make her look like a Gay Activist tax Mongering Atheist.

When I said "Oh my", I'll vote for Brad, there were no questions asked but I did get a good blurb on his moral values.

This is B———-. I wonder how many people fall for this kind of crap.
If the best Brad can do is hire a bogus "research firm" to drag his opponent through the muck, what does this say for his ability to think out of the box for our city? Boo Brad. Come up with something I can like you for buddy.

Basswood is a real polling firm; I've done business with them before, in the Johnnie Byrd U.S. Senate campaign. Very talented guys in the conservative Republican consultant world. (They also do most of the polling work for the supply-side-oriented Club for Growth PAC.) I'm sure the poll is legit, even if it does use some obnoxious push questioning. As I told Karen, I've almost never seen a campaign that polls that doesn't test tough, negative push questions to see if they would impact the outcome of the race.

I have no problem with legitimate scientific polling that asks negative questions, no matter how distasteful the push may be. "Push polling," which is the practice of making thousands of phone calls disguised as real polling in order to spread a negative message is vastly different, and very wrong.

This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2006.