Dem Congressional candidate Patty Weiss is accusing her GOP opponents of push-polling -- and, interestingly, the company she's claiming is behind the tactic is also the same company which is accused of push-polling against Kirsten Gillibrand, a Dem candidate trying to unseat upstate New York GOP Rep. John Sweeney.

Weiss -- who still faces a Dem primary -- is claiming that her campaign headquarters has received "dozens and dozens" of calls from people who reported receiving a call allegedly asking respondents if they would still vote for Weiss if they knew she'd received large contributions from pharmaceutical companies, the Arizona Daily Star reports. Weiss says the claim about the pharmaceutical companies is false.

Weiss is also claiming that the calls can be traced back to a company called Western Watts, a company that works for the Tarrance Group, which does lots of work for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. Western Wats is also reported to be behind the calls which went out to voters in Kirsten Gillibrand's district.

After we reported on the alleged push polls targeting Gillibrand, a number of readers wrote in to protest that the polls in question weren't push polls. And it's likely those readers wouldn't see the polls being done about Weiss as push polls, either. But Mickey Carroll, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, told Election Central that he thought they were in fact push polls. His definition of push poll is one where the questioner is trying to "push" a person's opinion in a particular direction, rather than merely elicit an opinion. That definition seems like it would apply to the Weiss questions, though we acknowledge that the term is an imperfect one and more needs to be known about a particular pollster's motive before one can definitively label something a push poll.