A pollster under oath

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Politico:

When a pollster or strategist for a struggling political campaign presents what seems like a sugar-coated view of his candidate's chances, do you ever think: I wish I could give that adviser some truth serum, or maybe put him under oath?

Well, truth serum may be pushing it, but the put-him-under-oath part has actually happened. And when a pollster is required to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, under penalty of perjury, what emerges is quite a bit different than what you hear in the waning days of a presidential campaign.

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.

(See also: PHOTOS: John Edwards on trial)

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.

"They were pounding on me for positive information. You know, where is some good news we can share with people? We were monitoring all these polls and I was sending the ones that were most favorable because [campaign aides] wanted to share them with reporters," Hickman testified on May 14 at the trial in Greensboro, N.C. "We were not finding very much good news and I was trying to give them what I could find."

Hickman testified that when circulating the polls, he didn't much care if they were accurate. "I didn't necessarily take any of these as for—as you would say, for the truth of the matter. I took them more as something that could be used as propaganda for the campaign," the veteran pollster said.

(Also on POLITICO: The parallel universe where Mitt Romney leads all polls)

Edwards's viability from late 2007 through January 2008 was a hotly disputed issue at his trial because federal prosecutors were seeking to prove that nearly $1 million in expenses Edwards backers paid for his mistress in and around that time frame amounted to donations to advance his bid for the presidency. Edwards's defense contended that his inner circle viewed his prospects of winning the presidency as zero or close to it, once Sen. Barack Obama's juggernaut gathered steam, so the payments must have been made out of personal affection for Edwards or for some other reason unrelated to the presidential campaign.

However, Hickman's testimony also opened a rare window into the way major presidential campaigns try to use polling numbers to spin the press and laid bare the fact that top campaign operatives sometimes propound a version of the truth starkly at odds with what they themselves believe.

Hickman, called by the former senator's defense, testified that he told Edwards in "early to middle of November 2007," that the campaign wasn't going to succeed.

"I told him that the odds were overwhelming that we were not going—that he was not going to be the nominee for president. I mean, we talked about a variety of things might change, do differently, and all that, but none of them translated into winning the nomination," the North Carolina-based pollster told Edwards attorney Alan Duncan.

However, under cross-examination by lead prosecutor David Harbach, Hickman acknowledged sending a series of emails in November and December, and even into January, endorsing or promoting polls that made Edwards look good. Asked about what appeared to be a New York Times/CBS poll released in mid-November showing an effective "three-way tie" in Iowa with Hillary Clinton at 25 percent, Edwards at 23 percent and Obama at 22 percent, Hickman acknowledged he circulated it but insisted he didn't think it was correct.

"The business I'm in is a business any fool can get into, and a lot can happen. I'm sure there was a poll like that," the folksy Hickman told jurors when first asked about a poll showing the race tied. "I kept up with every poll that was done, including our own, and there may have been a few that showed them a tie, but... that's not really what my analysis is. Campaigns are about trajectory, and... there could have been a point at which it was a tie in the sense that we were coming down, and Obama was going up, and Clinton was going up."

Hickman also indicated that senior campaign staffers knew many of the polls were poorly done and of little value. "We didn't take these dog and cat and baby-sitter polls seriously," he said.

Hickman acknowledged that on January 2, 2008, a day before the Iowa caucuses, he sent out a summary of nine post-Christmas Iowa polls showing Edwards in contention in the Hawkeye State. However, he testified two-thirds of them were from firms he considered "ones we typically would not put a lot of credence in." Hickman put Mason-Dixon, Strategic Vision, Insider Advantage, Zogby and Research 2000 in the "less reputable" group. He also told the court that ARG polls "have a miserable track record."

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Busting the pollsters.