Monday evening, as I was leaving the office, I got a call to participate in a poll on politics and progress in Camden, City. That doesn’t happen very often, in part because I kept my phone number from when I lived in DC so I have a non-local area code. So I was pretty excited to finally be included in a local opinion poll. And then things got weird.
When the caller introduced the poll, I thought the call was from NJ.com. It wasn’t until I got into the questions that I realized something was off. The caller asked for my opinions for some of the major new employers that received tax subsidies to move to the city. She asked about Subaru. About the 76ers. She asked about job growth numbers. But each time, there was one major company conspicuously missing from the poll: Holtec.
It’s a strange absence for a poll, particularly because Holtec received the largest award, and has been in two major scandals (one about racist statements towards Camden residents, and another about lying on the application to receive their tax subsidy). In fact, their award was recently suspended. It seems like any poll interested in perspectives about companies coming to the city.
That was when I asked to confirm that NJ.com was conducting the survey. Except the caller said it wasn’t NJ.com. It was NJ Opinion Surveys.
It got worse from there. Questions included one-sided paragraphs about progress. Answers options were unbalanced (with more positive options than negative, so that if you split the difference, it’d still be possible for the poll to claim the majority of people were positive on a policy/institution/person).
Weirder still, the answers weren’t anonymous — they had my name, and said that the answers would be attached to my name.
It was essentially a “push poll”. Here’s what the New York Times had to say about these:
“Push polls” — which are not really polls at all — are often criticized as a particularly sleazy form of negative political campaigning. Voters pick up the phone to hear what sounds like a research poll. But there is no effort to collect information, which is what a legitimate poll does.
The questions are skewed to one side of an issue or candidate, the goal being to sway large numbers of voters under the guise of survey research.
Maybe we’ll see propaganda come from this poll. Maybe it’s just an effort, like many push polls, to try to change people’s minds by crafting and framing an argument while posing as a public opinion poll. And maybe it’s something more. But it sure isn’t science.
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