No Clear Signs Back Up McCain’s Claims of Bush ‘Push Poll’

WASHINGTON —  The charge was incendiary. Sen. John McCain, shaken and emotional, angrily accused Texas Gov. George W. Bush of using one of the most underhanded tactics in politics--a “push poll”--to spread negative information.

“He comes from a better family,” McCain said in South Carolina last week. “He knows better than this.”

But in the ensuing five days, as reporters have sought to pin down the charge, the evidence that has emerged doesn’t fully confirm McCain’s charges.

Some voters have indeed received negative calls paid for by the Bush campaign, but there’s no clear sign of the large number that a push poll would include.

Instead, the McCain campaign has provided the names of only six voters complaining about calls from the Bush side. Of those, three described questions that, while negative, appear to have been part of a legitimate poll. Another said she heard no negative information at all.

What is a push poll? Technically, it isn’t really a poll; instead, it’s a tactic for disguising a telephone smear campaign. Typically, a caller pretends to be conducting a poll and telephones hundreds of voters to ask questions about a candidate that include incendiary charges.

Seeking to Contact Many Voters

The difference between a push poll and a real poll isn’t necessarily the kind of questions asked. Legitimate pollsters often ask questions that include negative information, to gauge whether a particular charge will carry weight with voters.

Instead, the difference is in the method. A legitimate poll contacts a relatively small random sample of voters, typically from 300 to 1,000. A push poll, by contrast, seeks to contact the maximum number of voters, especially those who seem to be leaning toward its target but might be shaken by negative information.

What has happened in South Carolina is this: Last Thursday, a woman at a McCain rally in Spartanburg stood up and said her 14-year-old son had received a telephone call that described McCain as “a cheat and a liar and a fraud.”

“He was push-polled,” the mother, Donna Duren, said, adding that her son was deeply upset because he considered McCain his hero. “I was so livid last night I couldn’t sleep.”

Duren said she did not know who had made the call. But McCain, appearing visibly upset, denounced Bush and called on him to stop the practice.

“I’m calling on my good friend George Bush to stop this now,” he told reporters.

Bush, in turn, angrily denied the charge. “I don’t accept that kind of phone calling,” he told reporters in Fort Lawn, S.C. “If anybody in my campaign has done that, they’re going to be fired. I agree with the senator that this kind of politics shouldn’t be a part of the political process.”

Bush aides then released the scripts of two kinds of telephone calls their campaign has paid for: “advocacy calls,” urging voters to support Bush, and polling calls.

The advocacy scripts were bland and positive, stressing Bush’s campaign message without slamming McCain.

The polling script, by contrast, includes several questions that involve negative information about the senator from Arizona. But both Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer and a spokesman for the polling firm said those questions were asked of only 300 voters--a number characteristic of a legitimate poll, not a push poll.

The wording of the questions is far from neutral and, in some cases, distorts McCain’s record. The questions are similar in tone and content to the highly partial phrasing of negative radio and television campaign ads.

McCain aides say they simply don’t believe the Bush campaign is telling the truth on the issue.

“We are receiving dozens and dozens of calls from people who say they are getting all kinds of negative advocacy calls about John McCain,” campaign spokesman Howard Opinsky said. “Hundreds of calls.”

McCain Staff Provides Six Names of Voters

“The Bush campaign has basically said, ‘We’re not doing it,’ and released scripts that sound like legitimate polls,” he said. “But anyone who’s doing it is not going to release a script that says they’re doing it.”

However, when asked for the names of voters who had complained, the McCain staff could provide only six who agreed to talk with reporters. Duren, the woman who complained about the call to her son, was not among them. “We understand she doesn’t want to talk to the media any more,” Opinsky said.

The Times attempted Tuesday to contact all six South Carolina voters on the McCain campaign’s list, and reached three. One said she had heard no negative questions. Two others said they heard the same negative questions released by the Bush campaign.

One of the voters on the list, Richard Makely, 59, is the retired owner of a media research company in New York who now lives in Kiawah. Makely said he was puzzled by “strange and inappropriate” questions that came in the middle of what he was told was a political poll. After he told the caller that he supported McCain, Makely recalls, she read a paragraph about McCain and the Charles H. Keating Jr. savings and loan scandal, and asked if that would change his opinion.

“I said I didn’t understand, was that a question or a statement?” Makely said.

She responded: “I just read the questions.”

Makely said he was bothered “from a research point of view. . . . If people start using questionnaires like these, you hurt the credibility of all objective research organizations.”

Another of the voters on the McCain list was Paula Elliott, 47, a homemaker in Charleston. She said she received a phone call on Feb. 7 in which the caller told her he was conducting a political poll and would be asking only about Republican candidates. He asked several questions about demographic information. “It really came across as a valid poll,” she said.

Then came questions about the Keating scandal and McCain’s campaign reform plan. She said she told the caller, “It’s obvious what you guys are doing and I don’t like it at all.”

A fourth voter, Suzette Latsko, told The New Republic last week that she took notes on the negative questions. As recounted in the magazine, they sounded virtually identical to the script released by the Bush campaign. Latsko said she asked for the polling group’s name, and the caller answered with Voter/Consumer Research, the firm working for Bush. Latsko did not return a telephone call from The Times on Tuesday.

Another voter on the McCain campaign’s list had a different complaint: She said she’s getting too many positive calls about Bush.

Joanna O’Neil, 73, of Charleston, said her phone has been tied up with dozens of calls from people asking her to support the Texas governor. “During the first few, I said, ‘Don’t worry, I will.’ ” Eventually, she said, she began getting calls from a computerized voice urging her to vote for Bush. “I was totally exhausted. The next morning I called McCain because they needed to know about this harassment.”

Experts on polling said that if the Bush campaign’s claim about the small sample is true, those questions are within the accepted bounds of campaign polling.

“If it’s really only 300 people, it’s not a classic push poll,” said Benjamin Page, a professor at Northwestern University. “And they are asking for all that demographic information . . . if they were trying to get negative information out, they could do it much more quickly and efficiently without doing that.”

Times staff writer Geraldine Baum also contributed to this story.