Ben Smith at Politico is on this story like wet on water, he’s even covered the angle that the firm doing the polling, Central Marketing, is connected an Edwards pollster:
I’m told, more directly, by a source familiar with the arrangements, that they’ve done calling for the Global Strategy Group, the firm of Edwards pollster Harrison Hickman which has a New York office — but that doesn’t mean they did this poll, by any means. And the negative message testing they did in New York concerned Freddy Ferrer, the main oppponent of Mike Bloomberg. Global was Ferrer’s pollster; Penn Schoen & Berland was Bloomberg’s, and either could have commissioned that poll. That pretty much covers it, no?
And he digs up a nugget about their having done some nasty work in the past.
Over at Pollster.com, my sometimes co-Caster Mark Blumenthal makes the case that this isn’t message-testing after all: It’s push-polling, and out and out dirty trick:
These are just not the sort of statements that I can imagine any of the campaigns wanting to “test” in this form at this stage of the campaign as potential fodder for television or direct mail advertising. Think about the ways the campaigns are criticizing each other now in speeches, online videos and debates. The statements in the calls make no reference to votes on Iraq, Iran, trade policy or double-talk in regards to Senator Clinton; nothing about hypocrisy, being too negative or “piling on” in regards to Senator Edwards.
These oddly constructed questions look mostly to me like a clumsy attempt to dress up as a “poll” the beyond-the-pale reference to Elizabeth Edwards’ illness.
At very least, I find it utterly inconceivable that Harrison Hickman or the Edwards campaign had any connection to a five-question survey of this sort, and extremely implausible that it was part of any real poll conducted by anyone else.
So who would be doing this?
The bottom line is that I have no idea who is behind it, but we ought to consider another scenario as at least as plausible as the notion that this came from one of the Democratic campaigns. It is also possible that this was the work of some independent group with Republican ties that sees some value in gathering crude information about the Democratic race while fomenting ill-will and infighting in the Democratic ranks. If that was the goal, you need only read the comments under the posts of the blogger/respondents I linked to above to evidence of just that happening.
But again, we really have no idea. It could be anyone, and we’ll probably never know.
As someone who’s actually done message-testing polls, Mark has some other insights on how they work as well. (And, yes, people negative-message test their own candidates.)