GOP campaigning in HD25 starts negative

by NW Spotlight

Word is filtering in that a push poll was done last week in Oregon house district 25 (Keizer, St. Paul, Newberg) – a push poll that appears to attempt to portray newcomer Barbara Jensen in a favorable light, and attempts to portray Bill Post in an unfavorable light.

Push polls are a widely discredited and sleazy political tactic with personal attacks poorly disguised as “questions.” Wikipedia defines a push poll as “a form of telemarketing-based propaganda and rumor mongering, masquerading as a poll. Push polls may rely on innuendo or knowledge gleaned from opposition research on an opponent. They are generally viewed as a form of negative campaigning.”

Bill Post, a conservative talk show host, announced in December that he would be running for state representative in HD25 after Rep. Kim Thatcher (R) announced that she was running to replace retiring Senator Larry George (R) in Senate District 13. Barbara Jensen, described by the Statesman Journal as a longtime state government employee, announced earlier this month that she was also running for the Republican nomination for HD25.

The push poll may have been done by Pac/West, but we’ll hopefully know more about who’s behind the push polling once the Oregon Secretary of State’s campaign reporting (ORESTAR) is back online. Apparently Oregon’s Secretary of State Kate Brown knows more about fixing elections than she does about fixing web sites.

UPDATE (3/17/2014): The HD 25 polling appears to have been paid for by Andrew Miller/Stimson Lumber for Barbara Jensen’s campaign or by Government Relations Strategies for Barbara Jensen’s campaign