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Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Under Oath: Polls as Propaganda

By Rick Pearcey • October 2, 2012, 06:57 PM

Josh Gerstein writes at Politico:

In May, the pollster for Al Gore's presidential bid in 2000 and John Edwards's in 2004 and 2008, Harrison Hickman, took the stand in the federal criminal case against Edwards over alleged campaign finance violations stemming from payments to support Edwards's mistress.

Under oath, Hickman admitted that in the final weeks of Edwards's 2008 bid, Hickman cherry-picked public polls to make the candidate seem viable, promoted surveys that Hickman considered unreliable, and sent e-mails to campaign aides, Edwards supporters and reporters which argued that the former senator was still in the hunt -- even though Hickman had already told Edwards privately that he had no real chance of winning the Democratic nomination.

"Hickman testified that when circulating the polls, he didn't much care if they were accurate," Gerstein writes. 

"I didn't necessarily take any of these as for -- as you would say, for the truth of the matter," Gerstein quotes Hickman as saying. "I took them more as something that could be used as propaganda for the campaign."

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