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Public Opinion Strategies does NOT engage in push polling, voter ID, or GOTV programs.

The rapid rise in the use of "push-polling" as a campaign tactic has lead to significant confusion between it and legitimate survey research. In fact, "push polling" is NOT polling at all - it is advocacy calls under the guise of research. The differences between push-polling and survey research could not be more dramatic:

• Survey research seeks to collect or gather public opinion, NOT to inform or change it during the process. "Push polling" has as its sole purpose spreading information.
   
• Every survey research firm opens its interview by providing the name of the survey firm or the telephone research center conducting the interviews. Most push-polls provide no name of a sponsoring organization.
   
• Survey research firms only interview a limited sample of people that attempts to mirror the entire population being studied, frequently as low as 300 interviews in a congressional district to a high of 800 or 1000 interviews in a major statewide study. Push-polls contact thousands of people per hour with an objective of reaching sometimes hundreds of thousands of households.
   
• Survey research firms conduct interviews of between five minutes for even the shortest of tracking questionnaires to over 35 to 40 minutes for a major benchmark study. Push-polls are generally designed to be thirty to sixty seconds long.
   
• Survey research firms use different questionnaire design techniques to assess how voters will respond to new information about candidates and their opponents. The intent of this process is not to persuade or change the view of the electorate, but to try and replicate the information that could conceivably be available to the voter during the campaign. Push-polls are designed solely as a persuasion vehicle.

Public Opinion Strategies is actively working with AAPC and CASRO to help educate the press and public on these distinctions, and discourage the use of "polling" as a guise for advocacy calling.

• Stu Rothenberg's Political Report, 3/12/07, "For the Thousandth Time: Don't Call Them 'Push Polls'"
   
• CBS News, Kathy Frankovic, Director of Surveys for CBS News, 2/14/00, "The Truth About Push Polls"
   
• National Council on Public Polls Press Release, 5/22/95, "Push Polls"
   
• Campaign & Elections Magazine, Karl Feld, 5/00, "What Are Push Polls, Anyways?"
   
• Washington Post's The Fix, Chris Cillizza, 2/22/06, "Parsing the Polls: Unmasking the 'Push Poll'"
   
• Pollster.com, Mark Blumenthal, 8/22/06, "So What *Is* a Push Poll?"