“You know there is something wrong with the kind of job he has done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.” Now Republicans have an alternative to the question, Are you better off than you were four years ago?
Mitt Romney seemed to be speaking to the set of Americans who voted for Obama in 2008, voted for Bush in 2004, voted for Gore in 2000, voted for Reagan in 1984, and voted for Reagan in 1980. Mitt Romney didn’t seem to be speaking to the people at the convention because you damn well know that most of them voted for John McCain.
Also Mitt Romney didn’t seem to be speaking to Americans who are 18 or who will be 18 on Election Day.
Is there a reason that Romney’s speechwriters, advisers, even Romney himself decided to target a ridiculously small set of Americans?
I don’t see it that way at all. I see it as an appeal to young voters and independents who voted for Obama in 2008, and that’s it. I don’t see anything in the question that targets those who voted for Bush or Reagan, to say nothing of those who voted for LBJ or Eisenhower, either.
Personally, I think it’s a pretty decent line for R-Money’s campaign. It is a subtle attempt to turn the election from being a choice between two candidates with different ideas, neither one of which is capturing a great amount of excitement; to a race that is just a referendum on an incumbent president with a record that people may agree or disagree with. It’s the classic strategy of a challenger: “Don’t ask me to explain what I’m going to do, just tell me how you feel about the incumbent politician.”
Not everything a campaign does is targeted at every segment of voter. Besides, 18 year-olds aren’t reliable voters. The 18-24 segment turnout is typically only 60% or so of what the 25+ segment turnout is.
True, but you get more bang for your buck if you try to maximize the number of groups.
It also doesn’t work really well because it’s quite obvious that I wouldn’t feel the same way, but why in the world would that mean voting for Romney? It’s not like he’s running on the same platform as Obama did. And the different emotion is clearly excitement versus apathy, and the apathetic voter doesn’t vote for the other person, they just don’t vote.
There are a lot of Obama voters from 2008 who wouldn’t normally be Obama voters.
I’ll share my own experience of last night: I was at work when Obama was speaking, and my co-worker, who had his eyes glued to the TV in 2008, was texting while Obama was talking. He’s still going to support Obama, but clearly this just isn’t that exciting to him anymore. I pointed out the difference four years made and he just laughed. And went back to texting.
Those are the swing voters. The whole campaign has two goals. Get out the vote of your supporters and try to get as many swing voters as you can. You don’t actually move any of the D’s to the R column, but you can, if you’re lucky, move the I’s.
I disagree. There has been a lot of debate on Medicare recently; that’s just not a very important issue for younger voters. That doesn’t mean that each side is wasting their time talking about issues that resonate more with one type of voter than another.
If anything, with political campaigns making more and more use of new media, it means campaigns can be more effective in targeting messages to smaller segments of voters. It is literally the same phenomenon as the Howard Moskowitz research into spaghetti sauce: there is no one spaghetti sauce that is going to win over everyone from Ragu’s market dominance. But create a dozen kinds of Prego spaghetti sauce, and you will find people who prefer one or another of the flavors to Ragu’s standard recipe. Same thing with campaigns: why try to craft one message that will bring over large numbers of voters, when one can craft dozens of more precise messages to more effectively appeal to targeted groups?
Many voters don’t pick apart a candidate’s platform the way we do. How many times have you heard the adage that people vote for who they’d rather have a beer with?
It’s really simple: the more the Obama campaign can convince voters that the election is a choice between two candidates, with the challenger having outdated ideas, the more likely Obama will win. The more Romney can convince voters that this election is a referendum on the Obama presidency, the more likely it is for him to win.
These aren’t unique strategies. Virtually every challenger vs. incumbent race uses these themes. There’s a lot of reasons why McCain lost the last election, but one of them is that Obama successfully painted McCain as a continuation of Bush, in some ways making the 2008 election a referendum on Bush’s presidency, with Obama being the alternative, or the agent of “change” to people’s dissatisfaction with the way things were going. We all know how that turned out.
Romney is trying to use a very similar strategy. He is releasing very few details on his own plans, and pretty much his whole campaign is based around Obama’s failures, whether real or perceived. I still think the odds are with Obama, but you can’t say it is a bad strategy: national polls show the race as a tie right now. (Yes, I’m setting aside the state-by-state races where Obama seems to be maintaining his edge in the key battleground states, which is why I say Obama still has the advantage.)
Reagan was targeting Americans who voted for Carter with the question, Are you better off than you were four years ago?
Romney was targeting Americans who voted for Obama with the statement, You know there is something wrong with the kind of job he has done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.
Which begs the question, Why did you vote for him?
Good question.
The logic of Mitt Romney’s statement is that ‘I should not have voted for Barack Obama’ - ‘therefore, I should not vote for Barack Obama’ –
‘therefore, I should vote for Mitt Romney’.
Alternatively, there are alot of McCain voters from 2008 who wouldn’t normally be Romney voters.
It’s plainly obvious by Obama’s approval ratings: he won the 2008 election decisively, he enjoyed very high approval ratings during his first few months, and for the last year or so, the country has been pretty much evenly split on whether he’s doing a good job.
Seriously, isn’t it plainly obvious to you that there’s about 25% of the country that said that they supported Obama on January 20, 2009, who now do not support him?
I disagree. They may be some, but not “a lot.” Who are these people?
First, I think the group in question is larger than you defined. Second, why wouldn’t he aim part of his speech at them? A speech as a whole targets as many voters as it can.
To answer Mitt’s question, even though it wasn’t directed at me;), I feel even better about Obama now that he’s been tested with four years in office. In 2008, I admired him for his ideals and vision; four years later, I respect him even more for his substance. He’s proven that he isn’t just a bunch of lofty words but has been able to accomplish quite a bit against significant opposition while living up to those words.
Romney’s question is a strawman. It implies that Obama’s negatives have outweighed the positives of his first term, or that there has been nothing positive at all, and if you’re the kind to accept him at his word, you’ll go along. That’s what he’s banking on with that question. To twist Johnny Mercer’s lyrics around…
“You’ve got to…accen-tuate the negative,
Elim-inate the positive.”
There’s just no way anyone can say that his promises matched his results. Even if you think he’s been a good President all things considered, it’s smart for Romney to compare those results to the hype. Obama looks worst when simply comparing his performance to his own words from 2008. Not to mention his campaigning, which has been everything he criticized as “small” in 2008.