The Democratic-leaning polling outfit Public Policy Polling is pushing the stunning notion that media figures like Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge and Tucker Carlson want white people to think President Barack Obama hates them.
“Do you think conservative media figures want to make white people think Barack Obama hates them, or not?” PPP asked in a recent Wisconsin poll this month, according to results first published by Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin.
The question came after the outfit asked respondents if Obama hates white people and whether they have a favorable or unfavorable impression of the Drudge Report, Sean Hannity of Fox News and Tucker Carlson of The Daily Caller.
PPP pollster Tom Jensen told The Daily Caller Thursday that the poll was put in the field in response to The Daily Caller’s much-publicized video last week of Obama discussing race and Hurricane Katrina in 2007.
“Many people felt that the Daily Caller’s intent last week, along with Sean Hannity and the Drudge Report, in trying to make news out of a 5 year old video was to stir racial resentment among white voters against Barack Obama,” Jensen said in the email. “We were just polling on a topic in the news last week- one in fact that your own organization tried to make into news.”
He denied that the survey amounted to a push poll, where the questions are asked in an attempt to sway the view of respondents.
“Polling on something that received a large amount of media attention last week is not a push poll,” Jensen told TheDC.
On his radio show Thursday, Hannity said of the survey: “That is a sick question if you ask me.”
“They’re acting as advocates,” Carlson said on Hannity’s show. “They are an adjunct to the Obama campaign.”
In her story, Rubin wrote that every independent and Republican pollster she spoke to about the survey were “shocked” by the questions. One independent pollster called it “low rent” polling.
“I am just taken aback that a respectable polling firm would even ask a question like that,” one Republican pollster told Rubin.
According to the results, 13 percent of people surveyed in Wisconsin think Obama hates white people. Seventy-one percent do not think that, and 15 percent are not sure.
Twenty-nine percent think conservative media figures want white people to think Obama hates them, while 51 percent think they do not. Twenty percent, according to the poll, said they are not sure.
On Twitter, Jensen elaborated on the poll and said no one paid them for the survey. “Just things we [we’re] interested in internally,” he wrote.