Leroy Towns says "push polls" are oftentimes not.

On his Talk Politics blog, the UNC-Chapel Hill journalism professor writes that polls designed to spread misinformation about an opponent are "rather sleazy tactics."

But he says that there are legitimate reasons for candidates to ask negative questions, including testing arguments for use against opponents.

Push polls have such a bad media reputation that when voters hear the "push" question in a legitimate poll, they call the newspaper and complain candidate A is push polling. Reporters fall for it almost every time.

Towns says political reporters (including Dome) have an obligation to "sort out" sleazy poll questions from legitimate ones and provide evidence calls were made.

Note to Towns: That's why we asked readers to record the calls. 

The N.C. Association of Educators is not making calls through TDM Research.

Cecil Banks, a spokesman for the group, said that they have made calls about the governor's race in the past month using Washington, D.C.-based pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.

He said the calls were not "push polls," in which a poll format is used to float attacks against the opposing candidate. Rather, he said they were for internal use.

To the recipient, it can be hard to distinguish the two. In the latter, a campaign or its supporters are testing various lines of attack to see which are effective.

Over the weekend, a Daily Kos blogger reported receiving a poll from the Fort Worth-based Tyson Organization, operating under the name TDM Research. He wrote that the questions tended to be positive about Beverly Perdue and negative about rival Richard Moore.

Banks said the calls were not done by the NCAE, and Perdue's campaign said they were not aware of them.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the NCAE had used Tyson.

A blogger alleges that Beverly Perdue is push-polling.

In a post on the liberal Daily Kos group blog, a Raleigh attorney who goes by the handle Old 33 writes that he received a call from a pollster at "TDM Research" about the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

"After a whole set of neutral questions, he started in on the push polling portion of the call...I started writing down his questions once I realized where this was going," he writes.

He writes that he was asked whether he would be more or less likely to support rival Richard Moore if he knew he has taken campaign contributions from Wall Street, made "risky investments" and "refused" to supply mandated reports, among other things.

He writes that a similar series of items about Perdue was uniformly positive, including sponsoring education initiatives, creating a prescription-drug benefit for seniors and strengthening a sex-offender registry.

Update: "We don't know anything about this allegation," said spokesman David Kochman. "We are not currently in the field and have not been for quite some time."

He said that Perdue would not do any push polling.

Previously: A guide to recording push polls.

Push polls are Ma Bell's whisper campaigns.

Under the guise of an objective survey, political candidates (and those who oppose them) sometimes hire firms to call up voters and give them leading questions.

"We're doing a survey," they say. "Would you vote for [Name Here] if you knew he is a cannibal?"

For the victims of a push poll (and Dome includes the general public), the hardest part is proving that they're going on. Multiple people can tell a reporter they received one, but, well, where's the proof?

In some cases, the opposing campaign will release the "results" of a push poll, though they usually tip their hand by declining to provide the wording of the questions asked.

But now, for a small amount of money, you can fight back.

After the jump, an explanation.

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