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The National Review’s Corner blog has been covering an interesting paper trail stemming from the anti-Romney push polling taking place in New Hampshire. And word on the street is that it could spill over into other early voting states including South Carolina.
Western Wats, the company making the calls, is based in Orem, Utah. One of its dialers, Amanda Earnshaw, has maxed out to Romney for the primary. The company’s founder, Ron Lindorf (he sold it years ago), is noted here as a founder of the BYU Business School.
Does it strike anyone;else as strange that this would be the firm hired to make anti-Mormon phone calls? [...]
So now it looks like Western Wats business manager Jeffrey Welch has also given to Romney (don’t know why that didn’t come up in my first search). Liz Mair blogs it here. [NRO... here and here]
Hmm… looks like that backfired on Romney. And is it just me, or did this have the flavor of a certain Romney-affiliated S.C. consultant?
Do a little more research here–and then forward your apology to Romney headquarters in Boston. Here’s an interview with a senior Western Wats employee that should easily dispel the rumor you are passing on as fact.
“He said the notion that this is Romney-driven is “nonsense” and “ridiculous”.
He did not confirm or deny that the calls came from his firm.
His company employs 1500 people with centers is Idaho, Nebraska, Utah, and numerous other states.
He also indicated that this is being blown way out of proportion. He thinks if the details came out people would scratch their heads wondering what the big deal was.”
First, he wanted to impress upon me that Western Wats does not do push polling, rather they do message testing. (I think this distinction will be lost on most people.)
Here are the key takeaways from the interview:
Western Wats does not write these scripts
They do not analyze the data
They don’t know the outcome of the analysis
Many times they don’t know the end client at all
I asked him about the NH AG looking into the matter. He said, he hoped they would it would save him a lot of headaches. The short of it is this (IMHO): we won’t get any answers until there’s a official investigation to pry it out of the NDA-clenched hands.
Here are some near verbatim quotes:
“I have to act like any business. I am under NDA to all of our clients. If I violate this there are serious consequences.”
“Believe me. There are 100 conversations I wish I could have in depth with people today.”
“The primary thing we do here is conduct and survey research data via telephone and internet surveys. We don’t write or design or analyze the results. We simply collect the data.”
“Like any industry, the research market is highly specialized. We specialize in making the calls and the technology that goes on behind it”
“First thing to note, we are not the author of the work, we don’t have a primary interest in how that data is used. Its used on Fortune 500 companies across the world and in political campaigns as well. When we do any kind of a survey we don’t have a direct interest in the outcome.”
“As to the donations. Its a pretty big company by our market standard. I wouldn’t be surprised if other people had given to other candidates”
“You should also understand that if you went to any political polling strategist the candidate message is tested as part of that process. Good or bad or indifferent. They use it to sculpt messages, speeches and media.”
“People don’t understand that this is very different from push polling”
“As a company we often don’t know who the client is.”
You can check out the details yourself at:
http://www.mymanmitt.com/mitt-romney/2007/11/exclusive-interview-with-western-wats.asp
You sickos are blinded by partisanship (or your paycheck…I can’t figure out which). Accusing Romney of orchestrating demeaning, prejudiced phone calls that disparaged his own religion just to grab headlines brings to mind accusations in the Arab world that the Joooooos invented the Holocaust to manipulatively gain world sympathy.
The attack was probably funded by a pro-McCain 527 group, and you know it.
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