Not a push poll

I got an e-mail on Monday, asking:

Does Labour use push-polling?

I had thought that push-polling wasn’t used by any of the political parties in NZ at the moment. But my partner just had a lengthy opinion poll telephone call with [named deleted by DPF] that involved a lot of what she thought were dodgy questions. Many of the questions involved the interviewer reading out statements by Key and asking if she felt less inclined to vote for National after hearing these. And by contrast there were lots of positive questions involving statements about the Labour Party.

This in fact though is not a push poll. Merely reciting negative statements on a politician is not a push poll – it can be legitimate testing of attack lines, messages etc.

So what is the difference between a push poll and research of attack lines? The American Association For Public Opinion Research has an FAQ on the issue:

Political telemarketing calls, when disguised as research, may sometimes be difficult to differentiate from a legitimate survey. Here are characteristics that will usually indicate that the call is not a legitimate survey.

• One or only a few questions are asked, all about a single candidate or a single issue.
  
• The questions are uniformly strongly negative (or sometimes uniformly positive) descriptions of the candidate or issue.
  
• The organization conducting the calls is not named, or a phony name is used.
  
• Evasive answers are given in response to requests for more information about the survey.
• The number of people called is very large, sometimes many thousands.
  
• The calls are not based on a random sample.
  
• It is difficult to find out which organization conducted the interviews.

And they explain the difference between message testing and a push poll:

The fact that a poll contains negative information about one or more candidates does NOT in and of itself make it a ‘push poll.’ Political campaigns routinely sponsor legitimate “message-testing” surveys that are used by campaign consultants to test out the effectiveness of various possible campaign messages or campaign ad content, often including negative messages. Political message-testing surveys may sometimes be confused with fake polling, but they are very different.

So that poll, presumably on behalf of Labour, was entirely legitimate as a form of message testing.  They were trying to find out which attack lines on Key will have the most effect on reducing National’s support, and conversely which lines about Labour will be most effective at increasing support for them.