Push Poll

A push poll is a campaign technique in which large numbers of voters are contacted under the pretext of polling, but the real purpose is to "push" them away from a candidate by exposing them to negative, often misleading, claims framed as survey questions. A typical script might ask, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for Candidate X if you knew they had done Y?" — where Y is a damaging allegation the caller wants the voter to remember.

Push polls differ from legitimate message-testing polls, which also probe how voters react to attacks but use small, statistically valid samples and are conducted privately for internal campaign use. Push polls instead target tens of thousands of voters, use short scripts, and rarely record or analyze responses. For this reason, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the National Council on Public Polls have long condemned push polls as advocacy disguised as research, not polling at all.

The most cited example is the 2000 South Carolina Republican presidential primary, where voters reported receiving calls suggesting John McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black child — calls widely attributed to allies of the George W. Bush campaign, though responsibility was never formally established. McCain lost the primary and later denounced the tactic publicly.

Regulation varies. Several U.S. states, including New Hampshire and California, require push-poll callers to disclose who is paying for the call or to identify themselves at the start. The UK's Market Research Society code of conduct prohibits members from conducting them. Enforcement, however, is uneven, and the rise of robocalls, SMS, and AI-generated voice outreach has made detection harder.

For researchers, push polls matter because they blur the line between disinformation, negative campaigning, and public opinion research, complicating efforts to measure genuine voter sentiment during election cycles.