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A pollster under oath

This post has been updated. See below.

When a pollster or strategist for a struggling political campaign presents what seems like a sugar-coated view of his candidate's chances, do you ever think: I wish I could give that adviser some truth serum, or maybe put him under oath?

Well, truth serum may be pushing it, but the put-him-under-oath part has actually happened. And when a pollster is required to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, under penalty of perjury, what emerges is quite a bit different than what you hear in the waning days of a presidential campaign.

In May, the pollster for Al Gore's presidential bid in 2000 and John Edwards's in 2004 and 2008, Harrison Hickman, took the stand in the federal criminal case against Edwards over alleged campaign finance violations stemming from payments to support Edwards's mistress.

(See also: PHOTOS: John Edwards on trial)

Under oath, Hickman admitted that in the final weeks of Edwards's 2008 bid, Hickman cherry-picked public polls to make the candidate seem viable, promoted surveys that Hickman considered unreliable, and sent e-mails to campaign aides, Edwards supporters and reporters which argued that the former senator was still in the hunt —even though Hickman had already told Edwards privately that he had no real chance of winning the Democratic nomination.

"They were pounding on me for positive information. You know, where is some good news we can share with people? We were monitoring all these polls and I was sending the ones that were most favorable because [campaign aides] wanted to share them with reporters," Hickman testified on May 14 at the trial in Greensboro, N.C. "We were not finding very much good news and I was trying to give them what I could find."

Hickman testified that when circulating the polls, he didn't much care if they were accurate. "I didn't necessarily take any of these as for—as you would say, for the truth of the matter. I took them more as something that could be used as propaganda for the campaign," the veteran pollster said.

(Also on POLITICO: The parallel universe where Mitt Romney leads all polls)

Edwards's viability from late 2007 through January 2008 was a hotly disputed issue at his trial because federal prosecutors were seeking to prove that nearly $1 million in expenses Edwards backers paid for his mistress in and around that time frame amounted to donations to advance his bid for the presidency. Edwards's defense contended that his inner circle viewed his prospects of winning the presidency as zero or close to it, once Sen. Barack Obama's juggernaut gathered steam, so the payments must have been made out of personal affection for Edwards or for some other reason unrelated to the presidential campaign.

However, Hickman's testimony also opened a rare window into the way major presidential campaigns try to use polling numbers to spin the press and laid bare the fact that top campaign operatives sometimes propound a version of the truth starkly at odds with what they themselves believe.

Hickman, called by the former senator's defense, testified that he told Edwards in "early to middle of November 2007," that the campaign wasn't going to succeed.

"I told him that the odds were overwhelming that we were not going—that he was not going to be the nominee for president. I mean, we talked about a variety of things might change, do differently, and all that, but none of them translated into winning the nomination," the pollster told Edwards attorney Alan Duncan.

However, under cross-examination by lead prosecutor David Harbach, Hickman acknowledged sending a series of emails in November and December, and even into January, endorsing or promoting polls that made Edwards look good. Asked about what appeared to be a New York Times/CBS poll released in mid-November showing an effective "three-way tie" in Iowa with Hillary Clinton at 25 percent, Edwards at 23 percent and Obama at 22 percent, Hickman acknowledged he circulated it but insisted he didn't think it was correct.

"The business I'm in is a business any fool can get into, and a lot can happen. I'm sure there was a poll like that," the folksy Hickman told jurors when first asked about a poll showing the race tied. "I kept up with every poll that was done, including our own, and there may have been a few that showed them a tie, but... that's not really what my analysis is. Campaigns are about trajectory, and... there could have been a point at which it was a tie in the sense that we were coming down, and Obama was going up, and Clinton was going up."

Hickman also indicated that senior campaign staffers knew many of the polls were poorly done and of little value. "We didn't take these dog and cat and baby-sitter polls seriously," he said.

Hickman acknowledged that on January 2, 2008, a day before the Iowa caucuses, he sent out a summary of nine post-Christmas Iowa polls showing Edwards in contention in the Hawkeye State. However, he testified two-thirds of them were from firms he considered "ones we typically would not put a lot of credence in." Hickman put Mason-Dixon, Strategic Vision, Insider Advantage, Zogby and Research 2000 in the "less reputable" group. He also told the court that ARG polls "have a miserable track record."

(See also: POLITICO polling center)

Hickman said he considered the Des Moines Register polls, CNN and Los Angeles Times polls more accurate. (A full transcript of his testimony is posted here.)

The prosecutor was clearly trying to suggest that Edwards was more viable than Hickman, a longtime friend of the ex-senator, admitted in his initial testimony. Harbach may have even been trying to suggest that Hickman's basic credibility was impugned by the heavy spin he acknowledged offering late in the 2008 primary campaign. However, the line of questioning was baffling to reporters in the courtroom who seemed not at all surprised that a campaign would insist on its viability until moments before the candidate dropped out or lost.

In short, to many journalists, what Hickman admitted doing in late 2007 and 2008 was no more a sign of bad character than an actor spinning a yarn on stage during a play or a lawyer mounting an implausible defense for a clearly guilty client.

When the defense got to question Hickman again, he was unapologetic about what he termed an effort to "keep up morale" among Edwards backers and aides.

"They were being inundated with bad news. I didn't have to give them bad news. I was trying to pick out morsels, you know, acorns. Out of a big stack of acorns, I was trying to pick out a few good ones that they could pass along to other people, you know, to keep them working," Hickman testified. "I mean, I wasn't going to say, you know, all hope is lost, you know, take a couple of weeks off. I mean, that was not the object of it. I mean, the object was to keep going as hard as we could. And we all worked as hard as we could. I mean, the working hard and promoting the candidacy are independent, in my mind, to the evaluation of what the likely outcome is."

Asked if what he did to that end in the 2008 race was at all unusual when compared with other contests, Hickman told Duncan: "No. No. I did -- you know, I did what I was supposed to do…. I did my job the way I've always done my job."

While the discussion of polling and the legitimate bounds of spin did offer an unusual behind-the-scenes look at a major presidential campaign, it's not at all clear that it had any impact on the outcome of the case against Edwards. Indeed, U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Eagles at one point admonished Hickman and Duncan that the grad-school polling seminar seemed pretty tangential to anything jurors were being asked to consider.

"I don't think we need quite this much detail about particular polls," the judge said.

"That's fine, your honor," Duncan replied.

"I'm sorry," Hickman quickly chimed in.

After nine days of deliberation, the jury revealed on May 31 that it had acquitted Edwards on one felony count and was hopelessly deadlocked on five others. The Justice Department quickly announced that it would not retry the case.

CORRECTION (Tuesday 11:15 P.M.): The initial version of this post said Hickman is based in North Carolina. His polling firm is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington D.C.

UPDATE (Nov. 2, 2:02 P.M.): Some, including the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Deb Fischer in Nebraska, have seized on this post and Hickman’s testimony in the Edwards trial to suggest that Hickman deliberately skewed his firm’s polls for Edwards and may be doing something similar again in the current election cycle. This year, Hickman is polling for Fischer’s rival, former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.).

After Kerrey’s campaign released a poll Hickman took last month finding Kerrey within striking distance of Fischer, Roll Call reported that Fischer campaign spokesman Daniel Keylin said Hickman “admitted under oath that he cherry picked numbers to boost John Edwards’s struggling presidential campaign.”

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” Keylin told the newspaper via e-mail.

However, neither POLITICO’s post nor the transcript of Hickman’s court testimony linked to in the original post indicate that the pollster deliberately skewed any of the polls he did for Edwards or anyone else. At Edwards’s trial, prosecutors did not challenge the accuracy of the surveys Hickman conducted on behalf of the campaign.