In a press release yesterday, House of Delegates candidate Kim Tingley denied fellow-candidate David Toscano’s allegations that Tingley has been running a push-poll. The press release reads as follows:
Tingley Takes High Road Responding to Toscano Allegations
April 20, 2005–Clement “Kim” Tingley’s campaign today denied the use of negative campaigning in response to allegations from the David Toscano campaign.
As is standard practice in political campaigns, the Tingley for Delegate campaign has hired a professional opinion survey firm to conduct a scientific survey of concerns affecting voters in this district.
The survey, which was designed as a scientific measure of voter concerns, covered a broad range of issues relevant for this election. It also included a small number of positive and negative questions about both candidates. In the poll more negative questions were asked about Mr. Tingley than Mr. Toscano.
Mr. Tingley denounced push polls and negative campaigning as unethical. When asked to comment, Mr. Tingley responded “I do not believe Democrats should attack other Democrats in primaries, since this only hurts the party in the general election.”
A former public servant with 15 years in county and city government, Kim Tingley has spent the past 20 years building affordable housing with his own business. He serves on the board of Virginia Forever, where he has worked towards clean water funding and land conservation.
Tingley’s depiction of the poll seems to match the portrayal by cvillenews.com user Jack, who received one of the calls.
I completed the poll this morning. I agree with Jack — very bad poll. Way too long. I was 3 or 4 times asked “if the primary was held tomorrow who would you vote for?” The fellow had poor diction and since I hadn’t started following the contest at all I thought he was saying “Singely.”
The funny thing was that he gave brief blurbs on the three candidates and based on that alone I thought Rich Collins sounded better to me, despite him going on another 10+ minutes about the pros and cons of Tingely and Toscano. At one point I had to ask how much longer was this going to take.
At the beginning he named the polling agency he worked for but I coudn’t understand what he said. At the end he asked a couple “demographic” questions about age and party affiliation and then asked for my full name at which point I asked who he was working for. He promptly put on his “supervisor” who had good diction who asked a couple questions from the beginning of the survey and then said “This survey is paid for and authorized by Tingely for delegate. Thank you. Good bye.”
I would say it was something of a “push” poll because I felt as though the questions were trying to convince me to change my answer to “who would you vote for tomorrow?”
My wife thought I was crazy for putting up with such a long “cold” call in the first place.
-M