Think Progress Exposes Potential Conflict of Interest on Latest Bogus Jewish Opinion Poll

Jason Attermann — July 13, 2011 – 3:27 pm | Barack Obama | Election 2012 | Polls | Republicans Comments (0) Add a comment

ThinkProgress has done some investigation behind the scenes of the latest bogus Jewish opinion poll that falsely claims Jews are abandoning President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. Apparently, the organization that commissioned the poll is run by the pollsters who conducted the poll. ThinkProgress reported:

Over at the Washington Post, Adam Serwer reports that the Post’s polling manager slammed [John] McLaughlin and [Pat] Caddell’s poll - an uncommon move for a major news organization’s pollster - as ‘a clear example of advocacy polling.’ But ThinkProgress looked at the organization commissioning the poll - Secure America Now - and uncovered a potential conflict of interest for the pollsters….

ThinkProgress asked John McLaughlin about Secure America Now and he told us:

Pat [Caddell] and I worked with [Secure America Now] to do the survey. [...] They paid for it.

When asked yesterday if he could provide a contact name for the organization, he responded that he would have to get back to us since ‘I don’t want to give you the wrong information.’
A little research revealed an article on the conservative Big Peace website from February, discussing how Secure America Now was founded by John McLaughlin and Pat Caddell to ‘inject national security issues into the public dialogue.’
McLaughlin acknowledged his leadership role at Secure America Now in a phone conversation today, and explaining to ThinkProgress why he didn’t provide a contact name yesterday because:

We don’t have any staff yet so that’s what I was looking for. You know, we’re just putting [Secure America Now] together.

And:

The poll makes no mention of the fact that an organization Caddell described as ‘a grassroots place where people can join up and begin to do things to force [national security and foreign policy] issues into the debate,’ commissioned its own founders to conduct the poll.
When asked why the poll didn’t reveal his overlapping roles as the commissioner of the poll and the pollster, he responded:

McLaughlin and Associates is a separate firm, and we do polling and consulting. It’s my own business. But [Secure America Now] is a 501c4 advocacy group discussing issues….

While McLaughlin candidly provided details of the poll and his relationship with it, he declined to offer details about the funding of Secure America Now.

Before ThinkProgress’ report came out, The Washington Post’s Polling Manager Peyton Craighill called the poll “a clear example of advocacy polling. They’ve generated leading questions to elicit a desired result to prove a point. In no way does this represent neutral, independent research.”
This report makes it abundantly clear that the McLaughlin and Cadell poll is simply too flawed to be taken seriously.

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