Busted: Read Footbridge Opponents' Totally Unhinged Push Poll

Over the weekend of May 16-17, opponents of the southern footbridge paid Florida market research firm Global Marketing Research Solutions to disseminate a "push poll" to residents of Bend.

Frequently used in opposition research, a push poll asks biased questions to try to get respondents to respond negatively to a given topic. Spurious results are then released as "evidence" to influence public debate. It's a naked attempt at misleading the public – and costs thousands of dollars.

The poll shows just how far a tiny number of wealthy opponents will go to overrule Bend's democratic voice. Residents voted for this project. Residents paid for it, too. And it hasn't happened because a few not-in-my-backyard opponents don't want Bend residents to access public land.

Is anyone surprised? In recent years footbridge opponents created the fake environmental group "Upper Deschutes Conservation Council." Earlier this month Connect Bend called out Oregon Wild for making objectively false statements about the project.

See the poll questions and our annotations below.

We invite the poll's sponsor to come out of the shadows and debate Connect Bend live on KPOV, if the radio station will have us.

Respondents receive a text message asking if they would like to participate in the poll. It begins with questions common in the market research industry, such as asking respondents to identify their gender or age category.

Other questions ask respondents to answer questions on a 1-5 scale about a variety of topics, including feelings approval toward BPRD, or how often a participant accesses the river.

These are legitimate survey questions. But keep going . . .

Gallery 1: It starts reasonably well

Click for screenshot gallery

As respondents go deeper, questions introduce emotional language, false information, and misleading claims, to guide participants to negative responses.

Question 18 asks if the participant would oppose or favor raising taxes to pay for the project. But no agency anywhere has ever suggested raising new taxes to pay for the footbridge.

Already no researcher would frame questions this way. But we're not close to being done . . .

Gallery 2: It's getting weird in here

Click for screenshot gallery

In the final portion of the poll participants are presented with multiple statements containing baseless and bizarre claims:

The notion that the bridge would likely be torn apart by floods and dump "tons" of steel and concrete in the Deschutes.
That the project includes "carving out new trails of gravel and concrete" and "paving" over habitat.
Or that building the footbridge would directly take money from youth sports programs.

These statements aren't just totally false – they're hysterical and out of control.

And guess what? Participants can only answer whether the statement increases their feelings of opposition, or has no impact on them at all.