DENVER—Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Friday he will take legal action to stop “push polling” in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Iowa that he said is falsely using his name to raise questions about rival Mitt Romney’s religion.
McCain said he did not know who was behind the push polls but said he had nothing to do with them.
Push polling is the practice of contacting potential voters under the guise of conducting a legitimate opinion survey but asking questions intended to plant a message in voters’ minds, usually negative.
Romney has been the target of push-polling designed to question his Mormon faith.
“Whatever campaign is engaging in this type of awful religious bigotry as a line of political attack, it is repulsive and, to put it bluntly, un-American,” Romney’s campaign director, Matt Rhoades, said in a prepared statement. “It’s ugly and divisive.”
McCain said his legal team planned to file suit in New Hampshire and was asking that state’s attorney general to act because New Hampshire has very specific laws on push polling. His campaign was studying what to do in South Carolina and Iowa, he said.
The polls, he said, are “using my name and making scurrilous comments about Gov. Romney and his religion.
“It is disgraceful, it is outrageous, and it is a violation, we believe, of New Hampshire law,” McCain said.
He called on other candidates to join him in the lawsuit and referred to Gov. Romney as a “decent man.”
McCain made the announcement during a campaign stop in the Denver suburb of Centennial, where he accepted an endorsement from former Colorado Lt. Gov. Jane Norton.
McCain said he was a victim of push polling in the 2000 campaign in South Carolina.
“I have seen this movie before,” he said. “This kind of thing has to be stopped.”
New Hampshire law requires that all political advertising, including phone calls, identify the candidate being supported. No candidate was identified in the calls.
Romney spokesman Rhoades said New Hampshire Attorney General Kelly Ayotte had said there would be an expedited investigation.
