Push Poll Appears to Promote LNG Project

• Questions Are Designed to Influence Public Opinion on Issues

BY HANS LAETZ

Proponents of the proposed liquefied natural gas terminal off the Malibu coast are phoning people at home to ask misleading and biased questions, some recipients said last week.

Experts said the technique appears to be “push-polling”—a technique used in modern political campaigns to push public opinion in one direction without the participants’ knowledge.

A graduate student at UC Santa Barbara reported getting a call from a pollster who would not identify whom he was working for last week.

“Similar questions were repeated over and over, mostly along the lines of ‘the proposed LNG terminal will be 14 miles off the coast, and it will provide a much safer and cleaner energy source than oil drilling. Does knowing that make you support or oppose the project?’” said Hannah Muller in an e-mail.

Another question asked if voters would oppose a politician who voted against LNG imports, plunging California into blackouts as a result.

“Yes, that certainly sounds like a true push poll, where poll provides biased information that will prompt the responses that the poll-giver is hoping to get,” said associate research professor Chris Weare, in the USC School of Policy Planning and Development.

Loyola Marymount University professor Evan Gerstmann listened to two of the LNG poll’s questions, and said “that sounds like a classic push poll.”

“A push poll is a form of political advocacy disguised as a poll,” he said. “The numbers from such a poll are not to be believed.”

Although some poll recipients said they were led to believe the questions were being asked by members of the California State Lands Commission, a spokesman for the SLC chair, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, said the agency is not taking a poll on the LNG issue.

BHP Billiton officials were in a closed-door meeting Tuesday afternoon and would not take a phone call about the issue. But the group opposing Cabrillo Port expressed outrage.

“Clearly, the vast majority of these loaded questions were designed to generate a misleading assessment of public support for the BHP proposal,” said Susan Jordan, Director of the California Coastal Protection Network.

“But what is more disturbing is that the poll appears designed to elicit a response that could be used to try to intimidate the State Lands Commissioners just days before they are to cast a crucial April 9th vote on whether or not the project should go forward.”