By now you should be familiar with my warnings about pundit-driven interpretations of presidential debates, so I’ll just repeat the highlights:
- Debates rarely produce significant changes in the support for either candidate because most people interpret the results through their partisan predispositions. For example, CBS reports that over 90% of Republicans who watched the Vice Presidential debate thought Palin had won, while over 90% of Democratic viewers thought Biden had won! Presumably they watched the same debate!
- The post-debates assessments via instant polls, media pundits, and focus groups must be viewed with a critical eye, particularly in the case of instant polls. Pay attention to the partisan weighting of the survey sample; a group composed disproportionately of Democrats will give the Debate to the Democrat, while a Republican-dominated group will give it to the Republican. Similarly, “uncommitted” viewers are not the same as “independent” viewers – indeed, they may not even be “uncommitted”. For example, the CBS knowledge survey of 500 “uncommitted” voters who watched the vice presidential debate actually consisted of viewers who were in fact supporting one of the two candidates, but who claimed that they were uncommitted because they might change their mind! In fact, surveys indicate the once a voter is committed to a candidate, they rarely switch allegiance to the other candidate.
- Similarly, be wary of “online” polls which are heavily biased according to who logs onto their site. Thus the online Drudge poll reported that those who voted on its online poll overwhelmingly thought Palin had won the debate. That result says more about Drudge’s audience than it says about the debate.
- Ignore the pre-debate spin, particularly the effort by both camps to lower expectations for their own candidate, and raise them for the opponent. Already, the Obama camp is claiming that the “Town Hall” format favors McCain. I know of no empirical studies that support this assertion.
With this in mind, what should we expect tonight? Keep in mind that the target audience is not the Washington-NY media axis, or the pundits on the cable shows. Instead, both campaigns are focusing on the dwindling number of undecided voters who are still open to persuasion. At this stage in the race, that number is roughly 5-8% of the likely voters. Moreover, they are even more focused on the persuadable voters in the key battleground states. So what must the candidates do to win their vote? Pundits suggests that McCain should go on the attack, perhaps by resurrecting the Rev. Wright stories and playing Obama’s “ties” to the former terrorist Bill Ayers. In my view this is the wrong strategy. Let the town hall audience raise this issue. McCain should instead attack Obama on the basis of his policies, focusing primarily on the costs of Obama’s health plan and tax proposals. He needs to sow doubts on Obama’s ability to solve the current economic crisis and instead convince voters that McCain is the true economic reformer.
Obama, meanwhile, has the easier task. He simply needs to continue to tie McCain to Bush and the current economic crisis, and continue to portray himself as the outsider who will bring change to Washington. Above all else, he must not do what his campaign manager said he will do: engage in a mudslinging duel with McCain. If McCain – or an audience member – goes on the attack by raising the Ayers/Wright issue, Obama should not respond in kind by raising the Keating Five issue, for example. Instead, he needs to stay calm and stay out of the gutter of personal attacks.
I’ll be live blogging, watching the NBC feed. I encourage you all to log on to my website
https://sites.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/ and join the fun. Just scroll down to the comments, write your post, hit submit and you are part of the solution, not the problem. That’s a good thing.
See you in a few minutes…