Huck Lovin’ Push Pollers Dial into Nevada5 million calls and counting.
The push polling group supporting Mike Huckabee, Common Sense Issues, has added Nevada to their list of target states in a big way. They’ve made over 300,000 calls there, the group’s executive director Patrick Davis* told me, and plan to “call every household in the state” (there were approximately 750,000 households in the state as of the 2000 census).
The automated calls fit the same model as those in the other primary states — South Carolina (over a million), Iowa (850,000), New Hampshire (800,000), Michigan (2,000,000), Florida (hundreds of thousands, though less than a million) —, where a voice asks the voter which candidate he/she supports, and then goes on to provide a battery of facts meant to demonstrate why Huckabee is preferable. Davis told me that the calls frequently begin with “this is a call from Election Research with a 45-second survey.”
As Nevada journalist Steve Friess writes on his blog, he got a call from the group Sunday evening. After saying that he supports Giuliani, he was informed that Giuliani supports gay marriage and “sanctuary cities” for immigrants and that Huckabee is a lifetime hunter. That’s substantially similar to what a TPM reader reported from Michigan.
There seems to be a specifically Nevadan component, though. Friess says that the call asked if he had a favorable view of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)…. “After I answered, the voice says something to the effect of what I think of the fact that Reid wants to surrender in Iraq and hand over our freedoms to Islamo-fascists.” When I asked Davis if that was an accurate characterization of the call, he said “yes.”
The group will go up with a TV ad in Michigan tonight and into tomorrow, Davis said, saying that the it wasn’t a very large buy — in the range of less than $50,000. It’s the same ad that the group ran in Iowa, which you can see on their website, TrustHuckabee.com.
*Update/Correction: This post originally referred to the group’s executive director as Rick Davis. His name is Patrick.