Right now there are two interesting incidents of what might be consideredpush polling occuring in Iowa. For those who don’t know push polling is a campaign technique in which pollsters are used not to record what a potential voter is thinking but rather attempt to change a persons thoughts about rival candidates. In 2000 this was done against John McCain. Pollsters acting more as telemarketers called voters and asked questions along the lines of “would knowing John McCain has an illegitimate black child change your vote”. The idea is that voters would leave the phone conversation believing John McCain fathered an illegitimate black child.

The big news from yesterday is that anti-Romney calls raising questions about his mormon faith, military deferments and more have been going out to Iowa voters. In addition there have been reports that anti-John Edwards and Hillary Clinton calls have also been made. Blogger doridc wrote over at John Edwards site about their experience as did desmoinesdem over at MyDD. Ana Marie Cox, Marc Ambinder and Mark Blumenthal

The story reminded me of something I haven’t seen added to the conversation yet. On this past weeks November 11th Chris Matthews Show, Newsweeks Howard Fineman had something interesting to say during the programs “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” segment:

Mr. FINEMAN: There’s a lot of trash talking going on in the phone banks in
Iowa. Everybody’s trying to be nice in public, but on the phone it’s a little
different. Somebody’s going to get caught. I don’t know which campaign is
going to get caught, but whichever campaign on the Democratic side does get caught, it’s going to be a huge story out there.

There has been continued speculation that Barack Obama’s campaign commissioned the polling. Some speculation has arisen that it might be a Republican candidate testing out messages against Clinton. But if you add the Howard Fineman quote you have more evidence pointing back to a Democrat.