What is in a Question?

The article entitled Content Analysis by Wimmer and Dominick discusses on page seven what process goes into creating the research questions. This analysis is very important as the way questions are structured can radically affect the result of the question. An analysis of how questions are written can reveal the bias of the questioner and or company that was hired to ask the question.

In this blog post, I am going to talk about something that is very unknown and rarely discussed outside of political circles. The only time that this practice gets mentioned on the news is when one campaign accuses the other of doing it. This practice occurs every year and is used in almost every close election across this nation no matter if the election is the primary or the general. One of the dirtiest parts of politics is a little secret known as push polling. Push polling is the practice of pushing negative and potentially false information on an unsuspecting voter using questions that pretend to be official polls. In push polling a person pretending to be a pollster will call you and ask questions that are effectively canned. The questions before they are ready to you, have been carefully analysed and constructed in order to result in you having an unfair change in opinion of a candidate. Push polling played a very important part in the 2000 Republican Presidential Primary according to CBS. 

These types of polls are often used by challenging campaigns that are attempting to prove that the incumbent is less than ideologically pure in the primary. Another reason to use push polling is that the incumbent is overly ideological to the point where he is putting his party preferences over the well being of his constituents. Everyone everywhere on the political spectrum has at one point or another used push polling in order to try and get a win.

In this video, push polling is showcased in a video. The push polling ranges from asking questions about your preference for governor to state treasurer. A key point is that all of the questions asked include very damaging, nasty, and potentially untrue information. The important point to analyze and think about is how each question was carefully constructed in order to help the person paying for the push polling to win the election.  To be fair, push polling is officially condemned by most professional organizations of political consultants, however fair politics is an oxymoron.

It is important to understand that push polling occurs so that if you ever find yourself in the situation where you are being push polled on you will not allow yourself to be manipulated by intentionally fixed sentences or false data. Remember what the two writers wrote in the article and think about how specifically the questions was phrased in order to determine the bias.

Finally remember that if a poll looks like this, it’s probably biased.