Haha. Push polls.
How is this a push poll?
The ongoing scandal of Wayne County Government and the Democratic County
Executive Robert Ficano has dominated the news for the past 10 months. Does this
continuing scandal impact your view of President Obama and Democratic candidates for
the general election?
That was asked AFTER the Obama/Romney matchup.
Irrelevant.
How can a later question effect the way someone answered a previous question?
I wasn't referring to the previous question.
Then how exactly is anyone being pushed in this poll? You have two unrelated questions - the horse race question followed by a question asking whether a local scandal affected your answer to the horse race question. Nobody was pushed to answer anything. The local scandal question is designed to gauge to what extent a local scandal hurts up ticket voters - negative reverse coattails.
A push poll is one where a pollster first asks something like "Candidate X has been known to beat his wife. Would that make you more or less likely to vote for Candidate X?", usually followed by similar questions that cast a negative light on Candidate X, followed by the horse race question (i.e. "If the election were held today, would you vote for X or Y?"). All the negative information about X pushes on-the-fence voters to say they'd vote for Y, even if they would have voted for X had the horse race question been asked first or previous questions had given a more balanced view of candidate X. There was no push polling here, because the horse race question was asked first.
Bringing up one party's scandals in a poll is very similar to campaigning on the scandals, even if the previous question wasn't asked second. So no, maybe they didn't ask the second question first so that it would show up in their polls, but that doesn't mean the horse race question changed voters' opinions afterwards, and that alone hurts this poll's credibility.
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