More discussion of the idea that Obama was already losing his huge lead before the debates.
I’m starting to get the sense that the solid lead he had then was a lot less solid than it looked.
The above certainly makes me wonder - liberal blogger Kevin Drum has his own opinion - about a key question here: I didn’t see this debate, so I don’t know, but I do know that the President performed sub-par. But was it really so bad that it mostly or fully explains most or all of his drop in the polls? Or Romney’s gain (as opposed to Romney’s own performance in a vacuum)?
I think it was not likely from the debate. But, because things like public opinion can be very sensitive to appearances, if the public has it in their heads that it was the debate, that means that the public can then react (or overreact) to another debate in response. In other words, self-fulfilling poll-phecy.
It could easily have been the debate (and the media’s reaction to it).
I think most of the estimates going in were that the challenger usually gets a couple of points from the first debate. You combined that with a sub-par performance, the media’s priming for a comeback narrative, and Romney’s willingness and apparent freedom to shift to the center, and you can pretty easily see how that gets to 3-4 points, which seems to be the magnitude of the bump.
Remember, that 3-4 points doesn’t necessarily represent people changing their minds or making up their minds. It can also represent people becoming more likely to vote.
I think something else was at play: Before the first debate, Romney was almost completely unknown to large parts of the electorate, and so it was easy to define him as being a rabid ultra-right scary guy. The Obama campaign was firing out some of the most negative ads I’ve ever seen - Romney killed a guy’s wife by taking away her medical coverage, Romney is one of the evil financial guys who helped bring about the recession, Romney is a meaner George Bush with nicer hair and teeth, Romney abused his dog, yada yada yada. Romney’s negatives went very high.
Then the debate happened, and 70 million people saw Romney without the Obama campaign filter, and realized he was not the Gordon Gekko caricature the Obama campaign portrayed. That’s why he got the big bounce.
The same thing happened to Reagan in 1980, the last time a debate had such a large effect. Until the debate, Reagan had been successfully portrayed as an evil, warmongering, doddering old actor who didn’t have the intelligence to be president. But Reagan showed up as affable, knowledgeable, and not nearly as scary as he had been portrayed by the Carter campaign, and he instantly erased months of negative campaign ads.
If that’s the case for Romney, then it’s going to be hard for him to have another big bounce out of this debate tonight, regardless of how well he does, because the viewers already know him and his likeable rating has already recovered from the early hits. On the other hand, it’s much harder for the Obama campaign to run negative ads against a real person rather than against a caricature, and if the public finds Romney generally likeable, going too negative could easily backfire.
In fact, this debate has much more upside for Obama, for the opposite reason. Obama’s image was very high going into the last debate, so the performance he turned in caused people to recalibrate what they thought about him. All he has to do tonight is turn in a performance that’s in line with the public’s previous perception of him, and he’ll erase the losses he took after the last debate.
So I don’t think it matters too much who wins the substantive debate on points. This one is going to be all about perception of the men themselves. The last debate on foreign policy, will be more about the content of the debate material and specific policy. But it probably won’t move the dial much if Obama recovers tonight.
*I *liked the Romney that showed up in that debate more than the prior Romney. He seemed more comfortable in his own skin. He spoke quite reasonably about the issues (even though I disagree with his analysis).
And I assure you that my impressions of Romney were not formed based on negative advertising. I’ve followed him since the 2008 primary. In that primary, and in this one, he cut the figure of a “severe conservative.” Whether that’s his true self or not is beside the point. The point is that the self he presented in the first debate was much more of a reasonable centrist than his campaign has presented up to that point. Hence the proliferation of videos of Romney debating his earlier self.
This patently absurd. Large parts of the electorate? Impossible. A minute fraction? Perhaps. But it is silly to suggest that likely voters could have avoided all the non-Obama-controlled media covering Romney for the last six years. Most people know MItt.
You underestimate how much of an outlier people like you and me and Richard Parker are. We follow politics closely, we read political blogs, we talk politics with our friends and adversaries, we read books, yada yada. We’ve been doing it for years, and we’re an older bunch.
But we’re not the people who move the dial after debate performances - I’m guessing that Romney wouldn’t get your vote if he saved a baby from drowning on live TV. So you don’t count, other than that you’re useful to help get out the vote for Obama or hold water for his policies in public debates like this. But your vote isn’t in play, and it’s not you Obama is trying to win over in a debate.
Remember, there are a lot of people out there who can’t even name the Vice President. There are young voters or newly-engaged voters who have no memory of the last presidential campaign and who damned sure don’t follow primary races and the rest.
This is especially true of ‘swing’ voters, who are also considered to be ‘low information’ voters. SNL has been having great fun spoofing on them.
There are also the ‘mild partisans’, who generally align with one side or the other not because they know anything about politics, but because their friends vote that way, or their parents do (or because their parents vote the other way), or because it’s just generally accepted in their region. Those voters may not pay any attention to politics at all until debate season rolls around and the whole country starts tuning in. What they know is what they saw in commercials between segments of “Real American Housewives” or “The Jersey Shore”.
My argument was not that swing voters are like me. They are not.
My argument was that your thesis of Real Romney vs. Negative Caricature Romney doesn’t capture the whole picture, a substantial part of which was Right Romney vs. Center Romney.
For those that only started paying attention at the first debate, they saw a reasonable-seeming politician versus a seemingly depressed incumbent.
But it’s also worth adding that swing voters aren’t who bumped Romney. His bump was largely the result of an enthusiasm change, just like Obama’s convention bounce. Most likely, that’s because of the perceived victory over Obama, not because of the actual content of the debate.
NM
If Romney had remained loyal to the far right and the values of our (white) founding fathers, this would have been so true, brother.
Clearly what will win the Republicans the Presidency in 2016 is more White Pride and folksy musings about rape. You should start volunteering your help now.