The Daily Background

Ooooh this does look kinda bad:

Democrats have accused the Republican candidate for state auditor of conducting a poll with a racially motivated question intended to point out that her opponent is black.

The telephone poll on behalf of Republican state Rep. Mary Taylor asks a series of questions about the voting record of Democratic state Rep. Barbara Sykes of Akron. Another question asks voters for their opinion of Sykes being president of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus.

“I cannot think of any reason why it would matter if someone knew she was president of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus, unless they are blatantly trying to gauge race in this election,” said Brian Rothenberg, spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party.

Taylor, who is white, said her campaign is testing information about her opponent’s strengths. Taylor said she considers Sykes’ leadership in the black caucus to be one of those strengths.

“It’s outrageous for her to claim that she would pay pollsters to say something nice about her opponent,” Rothenberg said. “This is clearly a racial push poll call.”

Republicans have used race-baiting as a tactic before. And there are even examples using the same tactic in push polling. Push polling is the dirty political technique that is not meant to get results on voters opinions, but instead is a sneaky way of placing advertising campaign messages (sometimes messsages that the campaign would be embarassed to say outright) into the minds of voters.

For instance, back in 2000, in the Republican primary George Bush’s campaign conducted push polling against fellow candidate John McCain, in which it asked voters if it would change their mind about McCain if they knew that he had a black child who wasn’t born of his wife. This was of course an extremely dirty tactic. The implication was that McCain had an illegitimate child with a black woman.

The truth was that the kid was’t black, she was Bangladeshi, and had been adopted by the Senator and his wife years ago from an orphanage managed by none other than Mother Teresa. Still, the push poll made an impact in voters minds, and I don’t need to remind you which man is President.

Filed under: oh six midterm Elections, Z-TDB Blog