I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
In a fundraising appeal, Lt. Gov. candidate Jerry Ortiz y Pino accused Democratic primary candidate Brian Colon of “push/pull polling,” a charge that Colon’s campaign manager Dan Sena denied to The Independent Thursday evening.
“Brian Colon’s campaign has begun, according to reports he personally confirmed to me, making telephone calls to Democratic voters using the questionable technique known as ‘push/pull’ polling,” a fundraising e-mail to supporters from Ortiz y Pino read.
But Sena told The Independent, “At no time have we push polled. …We never have and never will push poll.”
In 2007, during the campaign for the presidential caucuses in Iowa and primary in New Hampshire, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) discussed push polling.
AAPOR defines a push poll as unethical political telemarketing, calls disguised as research that are designed to persuade large numbers of voters — not to measure opinion.
“Negative or disturbing information about a candidate does not automatically make a survey a push poll,” said AAPOR President Nancy Mathiowetz. “Message testing, when campaigns test the effectiveness of possible messages about opponents and even themselves, is very different; and it is a legitimate form of surveying.”
Sena declined to say if the Colon campaign was using message testing or even any polling.
Ortiz y Pino described push polling as “a technique that Republicans have honed into almost surgical precision for swaying votes away from Democrats.”
The Democratic primary will be held on June 1.
