Often times we hear about so called “push polling” (boo..hiss) – a dirty type of political campaigning weapon where people are fooled into thinking they are taking part in a poll, when they are really being belted with loaded questions carefully designed to insert nasty memes into the minds of the survey respondents – memes beneficial to the party that commissioned the push poll or detrimental to their opponents.
Yet push polling has a bad habit of backfiring – especially if it becomes publically known that Party X is doing it, which means most (but not all) allegations of push polling we here about usually aren’t really push polling at all, but merely message testing. Message testing is usually undertaken in focus groups, but sometimes – particularly if the message is going to be a core theme of a political party, targeted at a particular demographic – focus groups don’t provide the testing depth to fully evaluate the political impact of the message, so the messages are tested in the field using phone “polls”. Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com pulls apart the current push polling furore in the US that Republicans were alleged to be running recently.
Now that the Nightwatchman has been dismissed after decent innings in terrible conditions – leading to few runs and no boundaries, it might be worth looking over the polls of the Nelson Era. Below are the Primary Vote and Two Party Preferred Vote margins since January for every poll undertaken by our public pollsters.
And finally, our Daily Intrade/Gallup trackers.
