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Many of us hate political polls, or claim to. Not Erin Breen.
“I want to tell people my opinion about things,” Breen, a Greenfield resident, told me with a laugh. “When I see a poll about something I’m interested in, I’ll say, ‘Why didn’t someone ask me?’”
So two weeks ago, when she got a text that asked “Could you share your thoughts in this 3 min Pittsburgh survey? Thanks!” Breen clicked on the link. That may have given her a preview of the kind of attacks we’ll all soon hear in Pittsburgh’s mayoral race.
In fact, Breen suspects the poll itself may have been such an attack.
Breen, and others who tell me they took part in online or by phone surveys this month, say the early questions are innocuous enough. Is Pittsburgh on the right track? What issues matter most to you? If you had to vote today, would you back incumbent Mayor Ed Gainey or his challenger, County Controller Corey O’Connor?
But then the questions take a turn.
“Ed Gainey supports releasing violent criminals from our jail back onto the streets,” asserts one query I’ve seen. “He even went so far as to support a 36 percent tax hike to fund attorney fees to help them get out of jail.”
I have no idea what this question is referring to. While there has been an effort to provide legal aid to indigent people facing eviction, that’s not the same thing at all. And Gainey hasn’t proposed a 36% tax hike to pay for it — or for anything else. (Though 36% is the increase of a hike in the county’s property tax rate.)
In any case, Breen is a staunch Gainey backer. While the survey asked if such assertions altered her support, all they did was make her angry.
“He wouldn’t have the power to release people from jail anyway, and it felt like an attack straight out of Trump’s mouth — which is weird for a Democratic primary,” she said. Questions about crime, she worried, played into old racist tropes. “[With Gainey] being the first Black mayor, I feel like people are going to not see all the good things he’s doing.”
“If anyone wants to poll the real issues in this race, they should ask about my comprehensive proposal to lower the cost of housing in every neighborhood that got passed this week,” Gainey said in a statement, referring to his bid to establish affordable-housing requirements citywide. “Poll on the $600 million for downtown revitalization” or on efforts to get “major nonprofits contribute as much to our tax base as nurses and firefighters. Pittsburghers are too smart to mistake out-of-touch politicking with solutions to the problems they face.”
The sponsor of the poll was not identified — which is typical, for reasons we’ll get into shortly. But Breen assumed that the survey was placed either by O’Connor or someone trying to help him.
O’Connor rejected that speculation.
"I want to run a clean campaign that talks about issues,” he told me. “This outside stuff is not helpful to anybody, and we denounce anything that comes from these outside organizations.”
O’Connor says he’s seen polls targeting him, which among other things accuse him of capitalizing on the name of his father, the late Mayor Bob O’Connor, rather than as a “successful, effective city leader” himself. This even though O’Connor himself served on City Council for a decade before becoming Allegheny County controller in 2022.
Messaging like this often comes from outside-spending groups rather than campaigns themselves. But as yet, I’ve been unable to identify the organizations involved here, despite reaching out to a couple of folks I deemed likely suspects. (One did confess to wondering how the attack lines performed with respondents.)
No matter who is responsible, such attacks can boomerang back on the people they seek to help if they get blamed for ugly tactics used on their behalf. And while candidates aren’t supposed to tell outside groups directly what to do, any such groups reading this should be advised that O’Connor told me, “I don’t know why they are doing it, but it has nothing to do with the campaign we want to run.”
Surveys with false or misleading questions are often called “push-polls.” They may seem like efforts to gauge public opinion but are really an attempt to shape it. They can also be efforts to gauge what kind of negative messages will work when the real attack ads begin.
“Every campaign wants to know which attacks might stick,” says Adam Bonin, an election attorney based in Philadelphia.
Either way, what makes the polls even more aggravating is the fact that unlike, say, mailers or TV ads, there need not be any disclosure about who paid for the survey.
That’s because the nominal purpose of the poll is to reflect voter sentiment, not change it: It’s just not the kind of campaign communication where disclosure is required. (Still, local election lawyer Chuck Pascal told me, “It’s an interesting question: Is there a point where a poll becomes a communication designed to affect how someone votes?”)
The campaigns themselves really haven’t crossed swords yet: O’Connor came out swinging when he launched his campaign, accusing Gainey of various failures. But that’s what challengers do, and Gainey offered an above-the-fray response.
And while campaigns sometimes engage in “redboxing” — creating semi-hidden web pages suggesting attacks for outside groups to borrow — I have seen no sign of that from Gainey or O’Connor on the campaign web pages where I might expect to see such messaging.
So what can be done to keep this campaign from ending up in the gutter before it really gets started? The two candidates face off Sunday at a forum hosted by the 14th Ward Independent Democratic Club. Maybe the candidates will be asked about what kind of role outside groups should play?
See what I did there? I asked a question designed to plant the idea in someone else’s mind. We’ll see if it works.
