Tales of a Push Pollster

What’s in the Swift Boat crowd’s bag of last-minute tricks? Nonstop robo-calls, for starters. Meet one of the nation’s top GOP telemarketers.

By Daniel Schulman
October 26, 2006

You may have gotten a call from Gabriel Joseph III already. It starts with one of those cheery robo-voices asking if you'll participate in a 45-second survey. If you don't slam the phone down at that point, you'll soon get to a question like this one: "In America when a person dies, the IRS can take up to 55 percent of the inheritance left for family and friends. Do you want Congress to permanently eliminate this unfair tax?" Next, you'll be told that the Democrat running for Congress in your district "voted to keep the death tax in place and refused to vote to make permanent the tax cuts that have caused record economic growth in 2001." At that point, you'll know that you're dealing with a "push poll"—one of the dirtier, yet mostly legal, tricks in a political operative's bag of last-minute campaign tools.

Push pollsters operate behind the scenes: They don't advertise their services, don't go on TV, and often can't be tracked as they hide behind dozens of aliases. The push polling firm that placed calls to voters in the South Carolina GOP primary in 2000, suggesting that John McCain had an out-of-wedlock child who was black, was never identified, though the calls may well have cost McCain that election.

It was all the more remarkable, then, when Gabriel Joseph outed himself and his firm in a legal battle in Indiana recently. Joseph's company had been doing "surveys" for the Economic Freedom Fund, a group bankrolled by Bob Perry of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth fame. When the fund was sued by the Indiana Attorney General's Office for violating a state anti-robo-calling statute, Joseph countersued; a judge ruled against him October 25.

Joseph's firm operates under at least a half dozen names. Most of the time, the company is called ccAdvertising, though it also goes by FreeEats.com as well as a range of less colorful aliases, including FEC Research, Political Research, and Election Research. The FreeEats moniker, Joseph says, is a hangover from the dot-com boom, when he was in the business of pushing web traffic to clients. Today, FreeEats does mostly political work. In November 2002, the company issued a press release claiming to have played a role in the "Republican force that swept America on November 5," noting that "no fewer than six winning candidates and one hot ballot referendum were influenced" by its efforts. >>>cont

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