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Zogby Engages in Apparent Push Polling for Right-Wing Web Site

Tuesday 18 November 2008

by: Nate Silver  |  FiveThirtyEight.com

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(Photo: AP)

    The conservative website HowObamaGotElected.com reports that it has commissioned Zogby International to conduct a poll of 512 Barack Obama voters as part of what can best be described as a viral marketing effort to discredit the intelligence of Obama supporters.

    The website, created by former radio talk show host John Ziegler to promote a forthcoming documentary, features a YouTube clip of interviews with 12 Obama voters who "were chosen for their apparent intelligence/verbal abilities and willingness to express their opinions to a large audience". The clip portrays the Obama supporters as giving "incorrect" answers to political questions such as "which candidate said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket". Of the 12 Obama supporters interviewed for the clip, 7 (58%) are black; nationwide, about 23% of Obama supporters were black according to the national exit poll.

    In connection with the YouTube clip, Ziegler describes that he "also commissioned a Zogby telephone poll which asked the very same questions (as well as a few others) with similarly amazing results." Partial results of the survey from among 512 Obama voters are reported on the website. It is not clear if voters for non-Obama candidates were screened out by the survey, or Ziegler has chosen not to report their results.

    Most of the questions on the survey take the form of a multiple choice political knowledge test, stating a "fact" to the respondent and asking them which of the four major candidates (Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin) the statement applies to. Questions include the following:

    "Which of the four [candidates] said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket?"

    "Which of the four [candidates] started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground?"

    "Which of the four [candidates] quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism?"

    "Which of the four [candidates] won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot?"

    As should be obvious, the veracity of several of these claims is - at best - debatable, yet they are apparently represented as factual to the respondent. It is not clear whether the respondent is informed of the "correct" response after having had the question posed to him.

    Not all of the items in the poll are intended to apply to Obama or Biden. Several apply to Sarah Palin, although the items about Palin, while probably unflattering ("which of the four [candidates] has a pregnant teenage daughter?") are nevertheless apparently true. The exception is a "twist" question about Palin in which the respondent is asked "which candidate said that they can see Russia from their house?". Ziegler claims in the video that none of the four answers is correct because the statement was made by Tina Fay rather than Sarah Palin. (In her interview with Charlie Gibson, Palin said that "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska", not that she can see Russia from her house.)

    To my mind, this survey meets the definition of a "push poll", which the Random House Dictionary defines as "a seemingly unbiased telephone survey that is actually conducted by supporters of a particular candidate and disseminates negative information about an opponent." That (i) several of the items on the survey contain information which, in addition to being negative, is arguably also untrue; (ii) Ziegler brags that the survey includes a trick question to which no correct answer can be provided, and that (iii) apparently only Obama voters were targeted by the survey (although this is not 100 percent clear), also inform my opinion that the survey can fairly be described as a "push poll".

    In an item on his personal website dated today, 11/18, Ziegler claims that Zogby will officially release the results of the survey tomorrow. Ziegler also appeared on Fox's Hannity & Colmes news program yesterday (11/17) to promote his documentary, on which clips from the YouTube video were shown.

    Why Zogby International has decided to accept this client and conduct a survey in this fashion is not clear. I would hope, however, that any and all clients that need legitimate polling work conducted would take their business elsewhere. These clients include C-SPAN and Reuters, two organizations with longstanding and well-deserved reputations for accuracy and neutrality; contact information for C-SPAN and Reuters can be found at their respective webpages.

  

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Comments

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It seems as if there is an

 Tue, 11/18/2008 - 21:27 β€” Anonymous (not verified)
It seems as if there is an intensive effort to make the phrase "Honest Republican" into an oxymoron. The impacts of people like Carl Rove will live on in the efforts of these spinners to make every Republican mis-informed and mindless.

I followed many polls at

 Tue, 11/18/2008 - 22:31 β€” DavidinRichmond (not verified)
I followed many polls at pollster.com throughout the campaign. Zogby was consistently an outlier more favorable to McCain than all the other reputable polls. I concluded long before now that they were in bed with the Republican Party.

Did you see this on zogby's

 Tue, 11/18/2008 - 22:54 β€” Anonymous (not verified)
Did you see this on zogby's site: We stand by the results our survey work on behalf of John Ziegler, as we stand by all of our work. We reject the notion that this was a push poll because it very simply wasn't. It was a legitimate effort to test the knowledge of voters who cast ballots for Barack Obama in the Nov. 4 election. Push polls are a malicious effort to sway public opinion one way or the other, while message and knowledge testing is quite another effort of public opinion research that is legitimate inquiry and has value in the public square. In this case, the respondents were given a full range of responses and were not pressured or influenced to respond in one way or another. This poll was not designed to hurt anyone, which is obvious as it was conducted after the election. The client is free to draw his own conclusions about the research, as are bloggers and other members of society. But Zogby International is a neutral party in this matter. We were hired to test public opinion on a particular subject and with no ax to grind, that's exactly what we did. We don't have to agree or disagree with the questions, we simply ask them and provide the client with a fair and accurate set of data reflecting public opinion." - John Zogby

Nate, thanks for reporting

 Tue, 11/18/2008 - 23:37 β€” Anonymous (not verified)
Nate, thanks for reporting this. Zogby is a respected name and it's important for the public to know of this bias.

It may be that psychologist

 Wed, 11/19/2008 - 00:55 β€” Anonymous (not verified)
It may be that psychologist David Amodio may already have done some of the Republican's work for them. About a year ago Dr. Amodio of New York University, told "Scientific American," as they put it, "Liberals and conservatives not only have different views of the world--their brains actually process information differently, a new study has found....his study shows that there are liberal and conservative (quote Amodio) ""cognitive styles" that may be largely hard-wired into the brain. In the study volunteers rated themselves on a scale between strongly liberal and strongly conservative, then took a test that measured their reaction to conflict and change. The test involved reacting to letters flashed briefly on a computer screen: most of the letters were M, but every now and then, the stream of M's was interrupted by a W. The test subjects were asked to continually press a button whenever they saw an M, and do nothing when a W came up. Liberals, the study found, had more activity in the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), a region of the forebrain that allows people to break from habit when necessary. A brain with an active ACC, researchers say, is more likely to alter its views based on new evidence rather than discount new evidence in order to maintain a steady opinion as conservatives do. This doesn't mean liberals are smarter or better, Amodio said. The cognitive style of conservatives, which is "more structured and persistent," (Amodio again) may be useful in situations where it is necessary to block out irrelevant or distracting information in making a judgment." Well now. I think I will look in on Dr. Amodio and see what he has been doing this last year. It looks to me like he has a nationwide laboratory available to him right now. I may even have to change my opinion of Republicans. I have always thought of them as the half educated Americans. I may now have to change that to the unable-to-use-new-evident-to-make-changes Americans. As I recall, using new information to advantage, even when it requires making changes, is one of the most important elements of intelligence. Even my dog does that with aplomb.

The answer to each of the

 Wed, 11/19/2008 - 00:59 β€” Anonymous (not verified)
The answer to each of the four questions is a resounding NO ONE!! That is, NO ONE did these things,and it's ridiculous to say someone did.

Well, Mr. Zogby. As a

 Wed, 11/19/2008 - 01:03 β€” brian (not verified)
Well, Mr. Zogby. As a statistician, you should very well know that not only the QUALITY of the questions in a survey are important but also the ORDER of the questions are important. I don't know if there was any monkey business going on with the order of questions, but the quality is clearly in dispute. You make yourself look very, very stupid indeed with your half-assed attempt to appear unbiased. Like DavidinRichmond (below) I also was glued to Pollster.com through the election. I noticed that both Zogby and Reuters each had a bit of a republican-bump. I had assumed that this bump was due to having some connection with the republican party but maybe not; maybe its more sinister than that. Maybe you guys already knew by what margin Diebold was planning to skew the results and you had that skew accounted for in your results so that you would look like the most reliable pollster. Null Hypothesis, I reject you!

Oh well, we Obama voters may

 Wed, 11/19/2008 - 21:00 β€” Cliff (not verified)
Oh well, we Obama voters may not know all the provincial capitals of Poland but we know which man has the character to be president. This wasn't a push poll, because a push poll is intended to sway the votes of the people being polled. So a push poll is supposed to reach a large number of undecided voters. Polling only 512 people who have already voted isn't going to affect the election result: Obama won.

This was not a push poll --

 Fri, 11/21/2008 - 05:27 β€” Regina (not verified)
This was not a push poll -- it was a no-poll, a string of loaded questions with the desired responses obvious. And 512 is so far from a valid sample that it could only be for laughs. For Zogby to indulge in this kind of inanity is stupid, and his reputation is in the trash for stooping to it.