Russian meddling? New Push-poll in Medford-Ashland Senate race

"If you like Jessica, they ripped her. If you said you like Jeff, then they ripped him"

                                State Senator Alan DeBoer regarding the push-poll

The push-poll targets both Jessica Gomez and Jeff Golden. Neither candidate commissioned the poll.

Weird.

Jessica Gomez website photo

In the past few days both Alan DeBoer and Cathy Shaw confirmed that local voters received phone calls from a polling company. The poll asks a few warm-up questions about Trump and Kate Brown and Knute Buehler and then got to the important question: whom do you favor, Republican Jessica Gomez or Democrat Jeff Golden?

Then the strange thing happened. 

Depending on whom the voter said they favored, they were then asked a very different series of "questions" which were not questions at all. It was a push-poll, but one targeting both candidates. Democrat or Republican, the voter got told negative information about whichever candidate they favored. The real intent of a push poll is to transmit negative, frequently completely untrue, information, but normally one would target one candidate or the other, not both. Push polls can put negative information into voters' minds anonymously. They get rumors started. The unattributed information circulates in social media. A push-poll isn't asking for information; it is pushing it.

Jeff Golden website photo

I spoke with both State Senator Alan DeBoer, who supports Jessica Gomez, and with Cathy Shaw, the campaign manager for Jeff Golden. Alan DeBoer responded to the poll personally, because he was by chance at a friend's house when the call came and he took the call. Hearing the negative things about Gomez imbedded in the questions, he assumed this was a Democratic-sourced push-poll. 

Meanwhile, Cathy Shaw heard about a poll from Democratic friends who called her, feeling angry about the poll they had just responded to. Those voters had answered that they favored Golden in an early question. They then got their own series of "questions" with inflammatory statements attributed to him. Shaw, in turn, assumed it was a Republican-sourced push-poll.

DeBoer and Shaw spoke by phone. By comparing notes they realized that the push-poll had the odd construction of trashing both candidates. 

Gomez supporters got "questions" that asserted that Gomez liked Trump (no, she doesn't), that she supported the Jordan Cove pipeline (she doesn't), that her company has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for injured workers (they didn't), and that she is taking millions of dollars from the government (she isn't.) How do our statements about Gomez make you feel, the interviewer asked? 

People who said they liked Golden were given a racist statement and said it was a direct quotation from Golden (it wasn't), and were told that Golden said he wanted women to "be subservient to men in the workplace" (he doesn't). How does our information about Golden make you feel, the interviewer asked?

Alan DeBoer, June 2017

"It's as if the poll were designed to create rancor in the community," Shaw said. "A twenty minute poll of this kind, given to enough people to have any validity, would cost at least thirty grand," she said. And for what, she wondered? To see if there was any swing in people's opinions after being told non-credible things?  

She said it made no sense for either campaign.

Both DeBoer and Shaw told me they contacted upstate sources of political campaigns, the Democratic and Republican Senate election campaigns, plus the state parties, unions and other potential sources for the poll, and each came up empty.

If the goal was to create longstanding animosity, it did not work so far. Shaw said,"The first response is to wonder why the other side was doing a poll that was so ugly. And it turns out, they aren't. Someone, somewhere must not realize that this is a small enough town that people actually get along and talk to each other."

The Russians are coming. Both Shaw and DeBoer reaffirmed their hope that the campaign would be positive and productive. Both Shaw and DeBoer joked that it just might be Russian meddling.

Cathy Shaw

DeBoer said the problem of negative ads is caused not by the local campaigns themselves, but by the "assistance" of upstate PACs who create ads on their own. Those PACs are legally independent of the local campaigns, although their ads are intended to benefit those campaigns. The actual source of the ads gets lost in the vitriol, and what they do ends up reflecting on the local candidate. 

DeBoer said the problems would diminish if people had to take direct responsibility for ads they run and fund. "We should ban all corporate and union donations. We should let there be unlimited personal donations--it's a matter of free speech--but every ad should name who paid for it. And every ad paid by a group or committee should have to list the top five donors to that committee right there in the ad."

Meanwhile, the two campaigns are communicating.

Request to readers: If any reader gets called for this poll, please don't just hang up. Play along. Go through the poll and pay attention to the questions asked. Then write me here describing what you remember about the call, either with a "Comment" or by emailing me directly at peter.w.sage@gmail.com. I would like to get to the bottom of this push-poll.