Replies

McCain spokesman Dan McLagan said, "What's happening is the Bush team has hit the panic button. They're throwing everything but the kitchen sink at us, and I'm expecting the sink any day." Michael Traugott, president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, said, "They breed cynicism about politics and we also believe they contribute to declining response rates for polls, just as telemarketing does. Push polls are not polls at all, just an invidious form of negative campaigning disguised as data collection." Veteran political pollster Warren Mitofsky of New York said the questions asked by Bush's Houston research firm "don't seem like research questions to me." He said that push polling erupted periodically and was difficult to prove.