Joe Sonka January 14th, 2008

Building on the posts of Terri and Shawn, lets take a closer examination of Mitch’s push pollers private polling firm, “Voter/Consumer Research”. From my post at BGR:

But wait a second. Who is this “Voter/Consmuer Research” who conducted the poll?

This, of course, is the hack Republlican polling firm that spews out numbers that could be labeled propaganda for their troubled candidates.

Let’s take a look at the poll they did last Fall. They found that Mitch was “popular” at a 57% approval rating and a measily 36% disapproval. But an independent SUSA poll from a week later found a slightly different story. Mitch had an all-time low approval/disapproval, at 44/47%. That’s essentially a 13 point difference. Coincidence? I think not. But knowing that his approval rating was sliding, a bullshit internal poll was just what the doctor ordered. (and quickly lapped up uncritically by the “liberal media”, I might add)

And what about CVR’s new poll showing him with 61% approval? Well, SUSA’s independent poll later that week showed him at 49% approval. Again, a 12 point difference. Just another coincidence? Ha. (not that the “liberal media” noted this, yet again)

And just who is this “Voter/Consumer Research” and Jan van Lohuizen? Check out this Washington Monthly article from Joshua Green back in 2002, showing his position as George W. Bush’s spinmaster.

Bush’s principal pollster, Jan van Lohuizen, and his focus-group guru, Fred Steeper, are the best-kept secrets in Washington. Both are respected but low-key, proficient but tight-lipped, and, unlike such larger-than-life Clinton pollsters as Dick Morris and Mark Penn, happy to remain anonymous. They toil in the background, poll-testing the words and phrases the president uses to sell his policies to an often-skeptical public; they’re the Bush administration’s Cinderella. “In terms of the modern presidency,” says Ron Faucheux, editor of Campaigns & Elections, “van Lohuizen is the lowest-profile pollster we’ve ever had.” But as Bush shifts his focus back toward a domestic agenda, he’ll be relying on his pollsters more than ever.

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This is typical of how the Bush administration uses polls: Policies are chosen beforehand, polls used to spin them. Because many of Bush’s policies aren’t necessarily popular with a majority of voters, Steeper and van Lohuizen’s job essentially consists of finding words to sell them to the public. Take, for instance, the Bush energy plan. When administration officials unveiled it last May, they repeatedly described it as “balanced” and “comprehensive,” and stressed Bush’s “leadership” and use of “modern” methods to prevent environmental damage. As Time magazine’s Jay Carney and John Dickerson revealed, van Lohuizen had poll-tested pitch phrases for weeks before arriving at these as the most likely to conciliate a skeptical public. (Again, independent polls showed weak voter support for the Bush plan.) And the “education recession” Bush trumpeted throughout the campaign? Another triumph of opinion research. Same with “school choice,” the “death tax,” and the “wealth-generating private accounts” you’ll soon hear more about when the Social Security debate heats up. Even the much-lauded national service initiative Bush proposed in his State of the Union address was the product of focus grouping. Though publicly Bush prides himself on never looking in the mirror (that’s “leadership”), privately, he’s not quite so secure. His pollsters have even conducted favorability ratings on Ari Fleischer and Karen Hughes.

Bush’s public opinion operation is split between Washington, D.C., where van Lohuizen’s firm, Voter/Consumer Research, orchestrates the primary polling, and Southfield, Mich., where Steeper’s firm, Market Strategies, runs focus groups. What the two have in common is Karl Rove. Like many in the administration, Steeper was a veteran of the first Bush presidency, and had worked with Rove on campaigns in Illinois and Missouri. Van Lohuizen has been part of the Bush team since 1991, when Rove hired him to work on a campaign to raise the local sales tax in Arlington, Texas, in order to finance a new baseball stadium for Bush’s Texas Rangers.

Like previous presidential pollsters, van Lohuizen also serves corporate clients, including Wal-Mart, Qwest, Anheuser-Busch, and Microsoft. And like his predecessors, this presents potential conflicts of interest. For example, van Lohuizen polls for Americans for Technology Leadership, a Microsoft-backed advocacy group that commissioned a van Lohuizen poll last July purporting to show strong public support for ending the government’s suit against the company. At the time, Bush’s Justice Department was deciding to do just that. Clinton pollster Mark Penn also did work for Microsoft and Clinton took heat for it. Bush has avoided criticism because few people realize he even has a pollster.

The nerve center of the Bush polling operation is a 185-station phone bank in Houston through which van Lohuizen conducts short national polls to track Bush’s “attributes,” and longer polls on specific topics about once a month. These are complemented by Steeper’s focus groups.

That CVR is Bush’s favorite internal pollster is all you need to know. Or is it? Just look at the type of polls that he’s doing. From the 2000 Republican Presidential Primary:

Nearly 1,000 miles from South Carolina and the bitter political war between George W. Bush and John McCain, one flank of that war is being fought from a four-story office building in the northern suburbs of this city.

On the top floor, in the offices of the Voter/Consumer Research Consumer, a few dozen people, college students to grandmothers, spent two days last week calling prospective voters in South Carolina to ask them carefully scripted questions. They began innocuously enough: Will you participate in the Republican primary? How much attention have you paid to the Republican race? Are things better or worse in the country?

But the questions quickly shifted to Senator McCain of Arizona, and the tone changed: In introducing questions, the callers stated that Mr. McCain’s tax plan would not cut rates for most people, that he had been reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee and that his campaign finance proposals would give unions and the press more influence in deciding elections.

What kind of poll is this? One written by the Bush campaign. The people conducting it were not starry-eyed campaign volunteers, but were paid by the hour, not much more than minimum wage. Bush campaign officials, however, say this poll is not an attack on Mr. McCain but is typical of the sort of polling done to learn about issues and their opponents’ possible weaknesses.

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Last week, one employee said, supervisors warned the staff against speaking to reporters. One woman said that Mr. McCain was not the only object of polling. She said she had spent time asking voters about Vice President Al Gore. One of the questions, she said, asked for opinions on Mr. Gore’s now retracted claim that he invented the Internet.

The woman laughed and described the process as ”mudslinging.”

So what does this tell us? Well, coupled with the fact that Mitch McConnell is flooding the KY market with TV ads, it could only mean one thing:

Mitch McConnell knows that he is vulnerable and he’s scared as hell about his chances of losing this Fall.

Well Mitch, I can only say that you have good reason to be.

• 2008 KY U.S. Senate Race , Mitch McConnell , Opinion Polls
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