More!
New Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican PathBy CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: November 6, 2006
Andrew Kohut, a longtime pollster and the president of the Pew Research Center in Washington, said the automated calling “smells like a push poll, it feels like a push poll, so I guess we have to call it a push poll.”
But Harold E. Swift, one of the organizers of the Ohio group, said he viewed the move beyond phone banks or simple taped attack messages as a “very sophisticated approach to voter education.” The goal, he said, is to “make people aware of the candidate’s stand on the issues that are important to them.”
Mr. Swift said his group, Common Sense Ohio, is a nonprofit advocacy organization and is financed by wealthy Republican donors. A sister organization, Common Sense 2006, has received a donation from the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee, an affiliate of the Republican Governors Association. Under federal law, the groups are not required to disclose their donors publicly or reveal how much money they have raised.
Mr. Swift acknowledged in an interview that if some critics thought the group’s polling approach seemed deceptive, “I grant that they can reach that conclusion.”
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Common Sense Ohio was formed in July to run issue advertisements in the governor’s race there, and it became involved in the Senate races in Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Tennessee, and in the abortion referendum in South Dakota.
Mr. Swift said two of the six people who formed the group, including its president, Nathan Estruth, worked at Procter & Gamble. Mr. Swift said that he and another of the organizers were retired from the company and that the group’s members shared conservative views on taxes and social issues.
Mr. Swift, who was once in charge of global privacy issues at Procter & Gamble, said some of the donors asked the group to expand beyond Ohio. He said Mr. Estruth, who was traveling and could not be reached for comment for this article, was familiar with ccAdvertising, a company based in Herndon, Va., that was hired to place the Common Sense calls.
Gabriel S. Joseph III, the president of ccAdvertising, said in an interview that the company, which also handles commercial marketing campaigns, began using the interactive software in political and lobbying campaigns in 2000. Its chairman, Donald P. Hodel, was a cabinet official in the Reagan administration and later served as the president of two conservative groups, the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family.
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This is criminal.
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