HILTON HEAD, South Carolina — A mysterious conservative group has been placing highly-misleading phone calls to South Carolina voters, trying to dissuade them from voting for the Democrat in an upcoming congressional special election.

South Carolina has a reputation for dirty tricks, and next week’s special election between former Gov. Mark Sanford (R) and businesswoman Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D) is no exception. One of the most popular tactics is known as “push polling,” whereby a group calls up voters under the guise of conducting a poll, only to ask questions that leave the voter with a highly-misleading impression about a certain candidate.

ThinkProgress spoke with multiple individuals in South Carolina’s first congressional district who have received push polls from an unknown conservative group that only referred to itself as “SSI Polling”.

April Wolford, a middle-aged woman who has long been active in Democratic politics in the state, was one. At 12:55pm on February 25th, Wolford’s cell phone lit up with “Unavailable” on the caller ID screen. A young man without a discernible accent – “he certainly wasn’t from South Carolina,” she noted – said he was conducting a poll and began with general questions about the race. “But they quickly got slanted,” Wolford noted, “and they didn’t ask a single question about Sanford at all!”

As the conversation turned, she asked him where he was calling from. “SSI Polling,” he told her, but wouldn’t elaborate.

The questions they did ask ranged from outlandish smears to thinly-veiled Republican talking points. Here are some of the issues SSI brought up in various iterations of the push poll, according to those ThinkProgress spoke with:

- “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you she had had an abortion?”

- “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you a judge held her in contempt of court at her divorce proceedings?

- “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if she had done jail time?”

- “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you she was caught running up a charge account bill?”

- “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if she supported the failed stimulus plan?”

- “What would you think of Elizabeth Colbert Busch if I told you unions contributed to her campaign?”

After about a half dozen of these questions, Wolford began to challenge the caller for asking such absurd questions. He apologized, telling her, “ma’am, I’m just paid to ask questions.” When Wolford asked who all he was calling, he demurred, saying he “just had to call the numbers they gave him.” She told ThinkProgress she suspects the calls were targeted towards Democratic women to try to discourage them from voting.

ThinkProgress spoke with April’s friend Flo Rosse who also received the push poll. She recounted a similar call with a young woman who began by asking standard questions but quickly moved toward those obviously meant to smear Colbert Busch. Rosse asked the caller three times who she was calling on behalf of, but, as she told ThinkProgress, “the pollster kept saying the name really fast so I couldn’t get it.” Disgusted, Flo hung up after just a few questions.

“It was so horrible,” Wolford said of the experience. “So ugly.”

Congressional candidates who are down in the polls often pull unexpected stunts to try to shake up the race — but even the most cunning strategist would have to question the wisdom of publicizing an unredacted list of phone numbers from people who have called the campaign.

This past weekend, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R), best known for lying about an affair with an Argentinian woman, ran a full-page ad in the Charleston Post & Courier to support his congressional campaign after it was revealed that he had been charged with trespassing at his ex-wife’s house. In the ad, Sanford included his personal cell phone number and told readers to call him “if you have further questions.”

After Sanford published his own cell phone number, House Majority PAC, a Democratic-aligned super PAC, included his number in a fundraising email sent Wednesday.

Sanford responded Thursday by publishing a list of unredacted phone numbers from anybody who had called his cell phone in an attempt to publicly shame them. See a redacted version of the list below:

ThinkProgress spoke with three of the people whose numbers appeared on the list – all were surprised and upset to learn their private phone numbers had been published. Darla, who shares a home phone with her 80-year-old mother and 91-year-old father expressed concern that they might receive harassing phone calls. “It opens us up for all kinds of issues,” she noted, adding that Sanford “didn’t even have the courtesy of calling me back to answer my questions.” That Sanford instead decided to make their home phone number public “speaks to the kind of person he is,” she said.

Thomas, who noted that Sanford did not tell callers that he was going to publish their numbers in this fashion, called the move consistent with his record of dishonesty. “I called his office to find out the best spot to get on the Appalachian Trial,” he quipped.

Tina, who told ThinkProgress she had called Sanford with a question about his use of taxpayer dollars on his personal travel, said this move seemed “vindictive and petty.” “He gave his permission” for his own number to be published and she did not, she observed, adding, “I’m not too happy about it and I’m not sure what the point was. He’s a representative, he’s supposed to respond to us, not to try to get back at us.”

Sanford’s campaign has grown increasingly erratic as polls show him trailing Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, even in the strongly-Republican district. On Wednesday, in an homage to Clint Eastwood’s infamous RNC chair speech, Sanford used a campaign stop in Charleston to debate a cardboard cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Adam Peck contributed to this post.

Former South Carolina Governor and current Republican nominee for Congress Mark Sanford has his work cut out for him if he wants to win the special election on May 7th, his first attempt at staging a political comeback after being forced to resign his governorship following a very public affair. But that didn’t stop one local county party chairman from adding another: the looks of the female Democratic nominee.

Sanford is running against Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a successful South Carolinian businesswoman who easily won her Democratic Party primary last month. But rather than challenging Colbert Busch on policy or credentials, Republicans seem focused on her physical appearance:

“Everybody is really concerned because she’s not a bad-looking lady, she is a good speaker and she’s got some money,” said Jerry Hallman, chairman of the Beaufort County Republican Party. “In politics, those things are important.”

This is not the first time a female candidate for office has been dismissed as little more than a pretty face with a nice speaking voice, but in the case of Colbert-Busch, who is the older sister of Comedy Central personality Stephen Colbert, she has been subjected to an unusual amount of sexist coverage by all corners of the media.

“Why Stephen Colbert’s Sister Could Beat Mark Sanford,” read one headline yesterday, “Stephen Colbert’s sister to run for office” was another. “Right now, the one thing that people know about her is that she is Stephen Colbert’s sister,” was how Sanford himself spoke about his opponent to Morning Joe during an interview yesterday. “Well, at the end of the day, Stephen Colbert is a very popular, well-regarded comedian, but at the end of the day he’s not on the ticket.”

Whether intentional or not, every one of these headlines poses a problem: they continue to define Colbert-Busch not based on her own successes but by the successes of her famous brother. In doing so, it allows readers — and, more importantly, voters — to do the same. Which of course isn’t fair to Colbert-Busch, who has the right to be judged on her own merits.

After Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced the Republican budget that would end Medicare and extend tax breaks for the wealthy, public backlash was swift. Constituent anger erupted at town halls across the country and polling showed the Republican plan hugely unpopular, even among GOP voters. The budget is so toxic that the leading Republican presidential contenders, including Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and Newt Gingrich, have steadfastly refused to endorse it.

Even GOPers are now admitting that the House Republicans’ agenda will end up costing thm seats in Congress. ThinkProgress recently spoke with former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford about what effect the Republican plan to end Medicare will have. Sanford singled out the upcoming New York 26th congressional district special election as one that Republicans may lose because of the Ryan budget, and conceded that his party would likely take “some losses” elsewhere as well. Still, the former governor argued that Ryan’s budget was “pioneering,” which necessarily “will involve losses”:

KEYES: You mentioned the NY-26 race. Do you think it would be worth it for Republicans to maybe lose a few of these races in pursuit of the ultimate goal of passing Ryan’s budget?

SANFORD: Yes. Everybody wants to play it safe in politics. But at the end of the day, you can only kick the can down the road so long. [...] Unless there’s entitlement reform, we’re going to see wheels start coming off the bus that would have again tragic implications for this generation and the next generation.

KEYES: If that’s the case, why do you suppose there might be these short-term losses for the GOP?

SANFORD: Because everybody’s scared of the unknown. They would say, back when I was in Congress, “there’s pioneers with arrows in their back.” And so nobody wants to pioneer on anything. But what is vital, particularly given the debt levels that we’re looking at, is that we see some pioneering. That will involve losses. Any real conflict will involve losses. In military operations and in politics. Too often, everybody wants to play it so safe that there are no losses and as a consequence, we end up kicking the can down the road. So my view would be, yeah, take some losses in advancing real ideas that will make a real difference in people’s lives rather than watering it down.

Watch it:

Fearful of such losses, Republican leaders are beginning to back away from many tenets of the Ryan plan. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) said he would not hold hearings on Ryan’s budget. Multiple GOP senators, including Rob Portman (R-OH), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), and Susan Collins (R-ME) are backing off the Ryan plan as well.

Last year, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) led a group of governors in a high-profile war against President Obama’s stimulus package, claiming that accepting the $700 million for which his state was eligible would lead to “a thing called slavery” and was akin to “fiscal child abuse.” Sanford — who even went to court to resist taking the funds — and his cadre of governors “focused their ire, in particular, on provisions that pushed states to expand jobless benefits” to people who previously did not qualify for help, something Sanford “vow[ed] to reject.”

However, the New York Times reports that Sanford quietly broke this pledge and is now accepting stimulus funds to help his state’s out-of-work residents:

Two months ago, however, with the bright lights of political promise dimmed by a scandal involving an extramarital affair, Mr. Sanford quietly signed a bill passed by the Legislature that expanded eligibility for unemployment benefits. The move paved the way for the state to claim $97.5 million in stimulus money to bolster its financially ailing unemployment insurance trust fund.

The federal Department of Labor announced Tuesday that South Carolina had officially cleared its approval process and that the stimulus money was being released immediately.

The reversal by Mr. Sanford attracted virtually no notice, but it made South Carolina the 33rd state in the country to expand jobless benefits to qualify for its full share of stimulus money under the program, according to the National Employment Law Project, a liberal advocacy group.

While Sanford’s affair may have hurt his national political aspirations, it has almost certainly helped South Carolina residents, now that Sanford has set aside his personal ambitions to do what is right to help his state’s unemployed. The new federal money will help more than 17,000 South Carolinians who previously did not qualify for jobless benefits, such as part-time workers who were laid off, and “workers forced to leave a job because of an illness in the family or because a spouse moved.”

Govs. Dave Heineman (R-NE), Sonny Perdue (R-GA), and Phil Bredesen (D-TN) all also made similar vows not to take stimulus funds for jobless benefits, only to eventually relent.