When we last left Common Sense Issues, they were still calling millions of people in key primary states, giving them the lowdown on how John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney fell short on key conservative issues (and how Mike Huckabee passed with flying colors). But even after their robo-voiced push polls spread the word about McCain's support for "medical experiments on unborn babies" or his role in passing "the most restrictive assault on free speech ever passed in America," Huckabee was beaten in state after state after Super Tuesday.

The group stopped making calls after Huckabee's defeat in Virginia. All in all, state totals provided by the group add up to more than 11.5 million phone calls during the primary in the 11 states. The group also ran a couple TV ads against Mitt Romney and a radio ad in Virginia.

With Huckabee virtually eliminated from contention, it's time for the group's next act. They've started up a site called convinceus.org, where they've posted an "open letter" to John McCain, from "Common Sense Conservative American Citizens Wanting to Trust You."

In the letter, the group lays out eight issues that it says it needs McCain's "assurance" on. They range from a pledge that he would support amendments outlawing abortion and gay marriage, to signing "the No New Taxes pledge," to a promise that he'd support gutting the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law "to protect citizens’ free speech." And then there's the kicker: he must publicly offer to have Mike Huckabee as his running mate.

Patrick Davis, the group's executive director, said that the letter did not amount to a commitment that Common Sense Issues itself would work on McCain's behalf. Rather, the letter was written on behalf of "conservatives around the country" who are looking for "John McCain to convince them that he can be trusted on conservative issues." Without such assurances, Davis says, conservatives might just stay home this November.

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And ... into Florida. The Mike Huckabee-supporting push poll group Common Sense Issues has stormed further south. The group's executive director Patrick Davis tells me that they planned to call "over 2.5 million homes" in Florida before the weekend. They'll also be calling "close to 200,000" homes in Missouri in anticipation of Super Tuesday. That will put the group's total calls this election so far at nearly 8.5 million.

When I asked Davis if he thought that the calls had helped Huckabee in South Carolina, considering the outcome and the negative press about the calls, he said "absolutely." Though "we would have liked to come out on top," he said, the calls "helped to define the issues for the voters making the decisions and differentiating between each candidate."

To refresh your memory, the calls are done in a poll format. Davis let me listen to the Florida call.

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On the one hand, Mike Huckabee really is in a bind.

Common Sense Issues is calling millions of voters and telling them that John McCain wants to allow experiments on unborn babies and that Fred Thompson supports partial-birth abortion. He can't do anything to stop it. And in a deft bit of spin, he says the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is at fault -- so it's John McCain's fault that Huckabee can't stop the group from smearing McCain.

He's criticized the calls, said he "wished they would stop," and now has gone so far as to tell NPR, "I personally wish all of this were outlawed." (He didn't mention that the calls actually are illegal under state law in South Carolina.)

On the other hand, from what the group has disclosed, it's apparent that most, if not all, of its major donors also support Huckabee.

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Yesterday, we quoted South Carolina's attorney general Henry McMaster as saying that since the Common Sense Issues robo calls seem to be against the law, they "should get some legal advice."

When I asked the group's executive director about this, he referred me to a two-page memo by the push polling firm they're paying to do the calls, ccAdvertising. You can read it here.

The bottom line is this: the group says that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection
Act, which governs robo calls, had an explicit exemption for non-commercial calls. So far so good. But the law also allowed states to make laws that would close that loophole and forbid robo calls of all kinds, including political calls. Even so, the memo says, "states are responsible for defending their restrictions under the First Amendment." Their stance is that " the [law] and the First Amendment permit ccAdvertising to place prerecorded calls for a political purpose, without regard to state laws that purport to prohibit such calls." In other words: you're going to have to sue to stop us.

As I've pointed out, two states have sued the company -- and both won. The company doesn't seem to have suffered much, though. Maybe a $1 billion "hurting" would change that.

This is certainly the nastiest line we've heard in the push polls going out to about a million South Carolinians. Respondents who say that they're supporting John McCain are told "Fact: McCain voted to allow scientific experiments to be done on unborn children." (Thanks to TPM Reader NC for flagging this for us.)

Patrick Davis, the executive director of Common Sense Issues, the group that's been paying for the automated calls, confirmed to me that such a line is used in the script: "He's in favor of stem cell research. That's the issue."

The medical experiments on unborn babies line is actually an old favorite of the group -- they used it in 2006 against now Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), when he was running against GOPer Michael Steele.

Update: The New York Times reports on another line in the calls:

The call first asked whom the listener was supporting in the primary. If the listener said Mr. McCain, the automated voice said that not only did Mr. McCain support research on “unborn babies,” but that in writing the McCain-Feingold bill tightening rules on campaign donations, Mr. McCain had created “the most restrictive assault on free speech ever passed in America.”

The call referred to the bill as the “McCain-Feingold-Thompson law,” evidently because Mr. Thompson had also backed it.

A number of TPM readers have written in with descriptions of the pro-Huckabee push polls done by Common Sense Issues, and we had a very good idea of how they went. But it helps to hear one. Luckily, one South Carolinian was able to record the latter half of the call, and Jeffrey Taylor, blogging at Reason, posted a link (wav).

We've transcribed the call below. Unfortunately, the man who recorded it missed the beginning, but here's how that would have gone. A male voice says "this is a call from Election Research with a 45-second survey" (sometimes it's from "Data Research" -- they're both names used by the calling firm, ccAdvertising). The voice then asks who you support. If you say Fred Thompson, you get a slew of reasons why Thompson is not half the man Mike Huckabee is. The transcription shows how that goes.

Now, there seems to be a specific question about state politicians at the end of each call that varies from state to state. In the example below, it's about Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). In the Nevada calls, voters who said they had a favorable view of Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) were asked what they thought about Reid wanting to surrender in Iraq and hand over our freedoms to "Islamo-fascists."

Again, we'd love to hear other recordings. So if you manage to get one, please email it in to tips(at)tpmmuckraker.com.

The transcription:

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We've been tracking Common Sense Issues, the Mike Huckabee-supporting push polling group, closely (click here to see our past coverage). They've already made millions of calls and last night, they unleashed another onslaught on South Carolina, where they'll call a million homes over three days. All told, that means they've made approximately 6 million calls so far this election (see update below).

The group's executive director told me that they're "well within the law." But one thing that hasn't been clear is whether any of the states will call the group's bluff and prosecute them.*

South Carolina has a law against automated phone calls. And the state's attorney general, Henry McMaster, is co-chair of John McCain's state campaign. In a phone interview today, he told me that his office was still gathering information about the calls, but that "I'd advise anybody making automated calls that they should get some legal advice."

The state's law carries a potential civil penalty of $1000 per call, McMaster said, meaning that the state could hypothetically seek a $1 billion penalty (see update below). "It takes much less than that to put a hurting on most folks," he added.

McMaster is a member of the McCain's so-called "Truth Squad," an effort by the campaign to counter negative attacks, and the campaign released a statement from him earlier today responding to the "several misleading claims" about McCain in Common Sense Issues' push polls. When I asked him whether it might be a conflict of interest for him to pursue a case against a group backing a rival candidate, he said no: "It doesn’t make any difference who we’re supporting or not supporting. In my state, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small place. You just have to be ethical and do your job and overlook those kind of things."

*Note: The firm that's been doing the calls on Common Sense Issues' behalf is ccAdvertising (also known as FreeEats.com). And their legal record isn't encouraging. That company has already lost twice in federal court. In 2004, they challenged North Dakota's do-not-call law and lost (they'd made approximately 235,000 calls polling a range of GOP hot-button issues). The company was fined $20,000. And in 2006, they challenged Indiana's do-not-call law and lost (the group made 400,000 calls attacking Rep. Byron Hill (D-IN)).

Thursday Update: It's been hard to get a handle on just how many calls the group has been making, but the group's executive director gave me an estimate of approximately 5 million this morning. That's based on his count of 850,000 in Iowa, 400,000 in New Hampshire, 3 million in Michigan, approximately 50,000 in Florida, over 1 million in South Carolina and approximately 500,000 in Nevada. This post originally gave an estimate of 7 million based on earlier numbers provided by Davis.

The post originally estimated a maximum penalty of $2 billion based on there being roughly 2 million calls in the state. But Davis would only characterize it as "over 1 million."

A TPM Reader writes in about Common Sense Issues' calls in Michigan:

I got a call from Huck's "independent" push pollers [Friday night]. It was a robo-call with a script that was micro-targeted for my Democratic union household. The robo-voice, which asked "poll" questions and left me time to answer, was an African-American male voice. Wanted to know if I was aware that "there is no real choice in the Michigan Democratic primary this year" and encouraged me to vote in the Repub primary instead.

Also asked if I was aware that the Machinists Union had endorsed Huckabee "for the first time in history..." (I assume by tonite they will add the Painters, too.) And if I knew that Huckabee was a fighter for working families, etc.

At the end, the robo-voice said the poll "was not affiliated with or authorized by any candidate or committee," but all the "questions" were designed to communicate positive information about the Huckster.

It's a classic ploy for these types of calls to play on ethnic and racial stereotypes -- though in this instance, the pollsters seem to have chosen their voice with the idea that a typically African-American male voice would appeal to Democrats. (When I asked Common Sense Issues' executive director Patrick Davis* whether it was accurate to characterize the voice in these calls as "an African-American male voice," he said "it could be.") Former dirty trickster Allen Raymond writes in his book How to Rig An Election that he had an array of actors available to portray a range of stereotypes, including "angry black man," which was deployed to frighten middle-class whites.

Unfortunately for the group, one of the Michiganians to get one of the group's two million calls in the state (most of which are going to Republicans) was Mitt Romney supporter Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI). He told the Politico that it was "an attack call masquerading as a poll."

Hoekstra also said that there was no disclaimer at the end of the call identifying the group behind the call. Davis says that the calls always have such a disclaimer, which is required by law. So please: TPM readers, if you get one of these calls, let us know what you hear. And if you're lucky enough to get one on your answering machine, we'd love to hear it.

*Update/Correction: This post originally referred to the group's executive director as Rick Davis. His name is Patrick.

5 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.

Yesterday we gave you the rundown on Common Sense Issues, a nonprofit group that's been phoning millions of voters in key primary states on behalf of Mike Huckabee. The automated calls ask voters about their views on certain hot-button conservative issues and then provide a barrage of facts demonstrating that Huckabee is stronger.

I spoke with the group's executive director Patrick Davis this morning and asked him to lay it all out for me. Where was the group active? How many calls had they made? And were the calls illegal?

In addition to the approximately 850,000 calls in Iowa and 1 million in South Carolina, the group made 800,000 in New Hampshire, and already hundreds of thousands in Florida (he said it wasn't up to a million "yet"). They're on the phones currently in Michigan, he said, and have reached on the order of two million homes. All the calls are generally identical, he said, with some exceptions.

For instance, the group is calling independent and Democratic homes in Michigan, encouraging them to cross over and vote for Huckabee in the Republican primary because "they don't have much of a choice on their ballot," Davis explained. A commenter to yesterday's post, ROSS in Detroit, said he'd received one of these calls, writing:

"I'm in MI near Detroit. My ZIP Code is heavily Dem. I just got one of the push poll robocalls described. It urged me as a Democrat to cross over and vote in the GOP primary for Huckabee! It was immediately clear at the beginning of the 2 min 45 sec call that this was in favor of Huckabee. . . . ."

See below for another description of the calls by another TPM reader.

Davis defended the calls, saying that the group's activities were "well within federal law." And he repeated the group's explanation as for why these weren't push polls (imitations of polls meant to disperse negative information). Every call is unique, he said, because of the group's "personal identification artificial intelligence" technology. And "every bit of it is factual."

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It's not much of a mystery which candidate the nonprofit group Common Sense Issues supports. After all, they run a website called Trust Huckabee. And they've made millions of calls in key primary states on Mike Huckabee's behalf.

From the various reports, the automated calls are transparent examples of push polls -- i.e. calls posing as polls, but really intended to give negative information about a particular candidate.

Common Sense has some considerable experience with this. In the 2006 elections, the group paid for calls attacking Democrats in at least five states. The robo calls followed their favored formula -- extremely leading questions followed by a barrage of "facts." In Maryland, voters were asked whether they supported medical research experiments on unborn babies. In Tennessee, voters were asked "Would you prefer to have your taxes not raised, and if possible, cut?" and then "Do you believe that foreign terrorists should have the same legal rights and privileges as American citizens?" You can listen to one of the Tennessee calls here. Always, the "facts" based on the voter's response.

When I talked to one of the leaders of the group, he told me that the questions used "accurate characterizations," and added: "There are a fair number of things that are unpleasant to talk about, but that doesn't make [our questions] any less accurate."

The group doesn't mind pushing the envelope. Since December, they've paid for calls supporting Huckabee in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and South Carolina; because they are robo calls, they've been able to reach hundreds of thousands of households (1 million in South Carolina and Michigan each, and approximately 850,000 in Iowa). Florida is apparently next. The group also ran a TV ad in Iowa which you can see on their website called "Who Can You Trust?" Just in case voters didn't get the message, they were directed to CannotTrustMittRomney.com, which includes a series of old TV clips of Romney proclaiming his pro-choice stance.*

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The biggest right-wing group backing "push poll" calls says it's targeting calls to "core supporters" on Election Day.

But there's reason to believe that the group might also use their mighty calling operation for voter suppression efforts, as well.

This morning, The New York Times checked in on Common Sense Ohio, the conservative nonprofit that's been polling millions of voters in the closest Senate races with questions that lead hard to the right ("do you support medical research experiments on unborn babies?").

In it, Gabriel Joseph, the proprietor of ccAdvertising, the calling firm hired to make these nasty calls, admits that "his company had tried to reach every home in Maryland." As the Times points out, there are over two million households in Maryland. The group has also been inundating voters in Montana, Tennessee, Missouri, and Ohio with its poll -- targeting the closest Senate races.

Voters in those states can expect to just keep getting similar calls through tomorrow. Zeke Swift, the Executive Director of Common Sense, told the Times that the polls "had identified core supporters, who will receive a reminder call on Election Day."

ccAdvertising has done more than just help Common Sense identify "core supporters," of course -- they also have a good idea of unfriendly voters, information that ccAdvertising has not hesitated to use in the past, as detailed last month by Mother Jones:

an investigation of a state GOP official by Alaska's attorney general in 2003 revealed another glimpse of [ccAdvertising's] playbook. "If they support our candidate, the candidate comes on with a 20-second GOTV thanking them for their vote and asking them to get their friends and family to vote as well," Joseph wrote in an email to Alaska Republican Party chairman Randy Ruedrich, according to the Anchorage Daily News. "If they support the opponent, we deliver a voter suppression message."

Update: Not discussed in the Times piece is the fact that Common Sense has not limited their activity to push polls. Mr. Swift told me last week that they've also bought radio spots in Maryland, Montana and Ohio, and sent mailers in Maryland, Montana and Tennessee. You can see their Tennessee mailer here; "Bob Corker and Harold Ford are separated by more than their school colors . . ." We're eager to see other examples of their work.

In increasingly tight races around the country, voters are receiving telephone "push poll" calls, a classic dirty trick designed to suppress turnout on election day. One calling firm in particular, with White House ties and an impressive ability to fire off millions of automated calls per day, is benefiting from the strategy.

Gabriel Joseph III, president of the robo calling company FreeEats.com, may be the king of the push poll, in which real-sounding questions with ludicrous premises are asked to plant negative ideas in voters' minds. His company, which is better known under its business alias ccAdvertising, has impressive Republican ties: According to a recent piece in Mother Jones, the group has, on at least one occasion, drawn on its White House ties to get business. And its founder, Donald Hodel, is a veteran of the Reagan administration and a former president of Focus on the Family.

As might be expected of an outfit that profits off of convincing people not to vote, ccAdvertising plays rough. Mother Jones reveals that Joseph once boasted of his firm's ability to "deliver a voter suppression message" to unfriendly voters. And as much as Joseph enjoys talking about the reach of his company's technology, he's not above threatening reporters: "If someone writes something that I don't like, I can make their life—I can make them understand a few things if I choose."

How would you know if you received one of the millions of calls ccAdvertising has made on behalf of clients, all Republican, in the past few months? A robo voice might have asked you, "Do you believe that foreign terrorists should have the same legal rights as American citizens?" or told you that your local Democrat "voted to allow the sale of a broad range of violent and sexually explicit materials to minors."

Not only has the Virginia-based company been making millions of calls on behalf of the Economic Freedom Fund, the GOP attack group funded by the money man behind the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, but the firm has also worked for Common Sense Ohio, a conservative nonprofit group active in the closest Senate races.

These groups go to ccAdvertising for one reason: the company is effective. It provides tremendous but targeted reach, largely under the radar -- and arguably without scruple. You can hear recordings of ccAdvertising's work this election here (from Indiana's 9th, funded by the EFF - a call a polling expert called "egregious") and here (from Tennessee, funded by Common Sense Ohio).

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Yesterday at TPM we brought you news of a "push poll" operation in Maryland in which voters were reportedly asked whether they supported medical research experiments on unborn babies. This afternoon, Paul spoke with the man responsible for those calls and similar ones against at least four other Senate Democratic candidates.

Zeke Smith, the executive director of the non-profit "Common Sense Ohio," said his group was behind thousands of calls to voters in Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, South Dakota and elsewhere -- oh, right, Ohio. He defended his group's questions ("Do you want your taxes raised?"). "Push polls" are used to spread negative information about a candidate, and are rarely used to collect respondent's answers.

The questions used "accurate characterizations," Smith said, and insisted his group was legitimately engaged in "data collection."

"There are a fair number of things that are unpleasant to talk about," Smith said. "But that doesn't make [our questions] any less accurate." His group is organized as a 501(c)(4)-type nonprofit, which requires the bulk of its advocacy to be on behalf of particular issues, not for particular candidates.

Common Sense Ohio was behind similar push-poll calls against Democrats in Senate races in Montana, Tennessee, Maryland and Ohio, Smith said. The group also called voters regarding the Ohio governor's race, and a South Dakota anti-abortion initiative.

Smith said he created the group to be active in Ohio -- hence the name -- but was approached by activists in other states to "help," presumably by orchestrating thousands of his unique brand of negative phone "survey" calls. "We have been approached by others in other states for help in their campaigns," Smith said.

Smith confirmed that his group uses a firm called ccAdvertising to make his calls. The "Economic Freedom Foundation," the GOP-backed campaign group Paul has covered extensively, also uses ccAdvertising. The group specializes in "robo calling," in which machines make thousands of unsolicited phone calls.