Dirty tricks in NH Primary?

Posted on January 8, 2008

Who is doing the push polling in NH? The AG doesn’t know - or won’t know at least until after today’s voting is done.

Someone is paying for calls that seem to be push polling against other GOP candidates and in favor of Huckabee. Huckabee has asked that they stop, has no idea who it is. The callers are giving false information as to who they are, who they represent and even the phone number they are supposedly calling from is false.

Push polling is known to backfire and the question is would someone use push polling to hurt the Huckabee campaign by pretending to support Huckabee? Stranger things have happened. Several years ago someone made phone calls pretending to be now NH Dem chairman Ray Buckley.

Push polling is so controversial that NH has banned it all together in all state elections. We did not include federal elections because it was felt to be beyond our purview. In hindsight perhaps we should have included federal elections in the ban and let the AG and the US attorney both have a chance to dig deep into this.

The callers direct people to a web site www.commonsensenh.com which does not exist, the closest match is www.nhcommonsense.org which is a pro marijuana group. Now they do not like Huckabee and there is even a libertarian web site that mentions that group in an article criticizing Huckabee supporter Sen. Bob Clegg.

Now, continuing in the direction of conspiracy theory, I found a quote from Matt Simon, executive director of the pro marijuana group NH Common Sense, “push-polling New Hampshire voters only ticks them off”. In the same article he points out his group gave Huckabee an F. But then of the other GOP candidates in the race only Ron Paul gets a good grade. The others are F or D-.

Now would a conspiracy against Huckabee use push polling that appears to be against McCain and Romney? Well if that conspiracy was trying to promote - oh say - Ron Paul maybe they would target all the candidates but Paul hoping to tar them all, but then I am running out of tin foil to build this hat - off to the dollar store for more (I wonder what the lead content of this Chinese tin foil is - am I poisoning myself by using it?)

Now where is my bug zapper, I need to re-scan my room - the NSA has probably planted a dozen while I slept last night.

» Filed Under Mike Huckabee, dirty tricks, Republicans, voter fraud, general nonsense, Legislators, National Politics, New Hampshire, Presidential Primary, NH Politics