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National Republicans
Gary Pearce posted on October 03, 2012 09:23
I have a feeling that Mitt Romney will get a bounce out of tonight’s debate. Not because I play the ridiculous expectations game, but because a Romney bounce is due and he can easily do well.
He needs to set aside all the conflicting and confusing advice candidates always get before debates. I spent almost 30 years doing debate prep, and I found one piece of advice that always works: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck.
This comes from author-pundit Jeff Greenfield. In the cartoons, Daffy Duck was spewing spittle and flying off the handle. Bugs was cool. And Bugs always got the best of things.
In other words, the most comfortable person on the stage is always the debate winner. Think JFK and Nixon.
Now, it’s hard to beat Barack Obama there. He is Mr. Cool.
But if Romney is confident and steady – especially after his unsteady last few weeks – he will get another look from undecided and weakly committed voters.
Plus, as I’ve said before, the media is looking for a new story. They’re getting tired of writing that Obama has it won.
Romney’s risk is that he overpreps, comes out tight, starts firing off odd “zingers” and sounding stiff and out of touch. Think Al Gore and George H.W. Bush.
If he comes across as an approximation of a normal human being, he’ll be back in the thick of it. And momentum will shift.
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Gary Pearce posted on October 02, 2012 17:19
Here is a debate preview from a TAPster who combines the best qualities of Carter and me: namely, hating both parties equally:
“Political dweebs everywhere will gather around their TVs Wednesday night for the much-anticipated debates between the North Carolina gubernatorial candidates and the Obama-Romney showdown.
“The NC debate is meaningless. The two candidates are good guys and essentially philosophic mirror images of each other. Pat McCrory has such big poll numbers that only a catastrophic debate performance will move the needle.
“The presidential debates, however, could make a difference. A smug Obama will glibly deliver his typical platter of pabulum, and try not to screw up. A superficial Romney will try to prove he cares about 100 percent of Americans, and try not to screw up.
“The undecideds and unaffiliated are sitting out there waiting for a reason to vote for somebody. A juicy debate screwup or two could change the election.”
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Gary Pearce posted on October 02, 2012 13:53
Republicans unhappy with Obama-leaning polls are resorting to what one wit called “the time-honored practice of making things up.” Led by Dick Morris, they engage in imaginative re-engineering of poll results to make things look better for Mitt Romney.
I asked a Democratic pollster I trust about the Republican revisionism. His reply:
“I suspect Romney has a few ‘hidden’ votes (as do most challengers, especially challengers opposing incumbents favored by the media), and Romney has an opportunity to quiet some of the doubt about him in the debates. The latter would help him in two ways. Republicans would be somewhat more likely to participate in polls, and he will begin converting some of the ‘undecided’ voters who are not willing to commit to the incumbent.”
But there’s no arguing that leading independent polls – and the averages of reliable polls – show that Obama has opened up a lead. And swing voters just don’t like or trust Romney.
It’s still close. But close isn’t so close in presidential races. Voters already know about all they’re going to know about both Romney and President Obama. That leaves little room for movement.
One national reporter told me last week he’s looking at coming to North Carolina just because it’s one of the few battleground states where Romney is still within the margin of error.
Maybe the debates will change things. Maybe the media will just get tired of writing the same story and see a Romney comeback.
One way or another, Romney can still win. Even if you don’t make stuff up.
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Carter Wrenn posted on September 28, 2012 17:59
There is a lot of sound and fury in the press – the latest storyline on the Presidential race reads: ‘Romney Stumbles,’ ‘Romney Sinks,’ ‘Romney Running Out of Time.’ Former Bush campaign aide Mark McKinnon wrote Romney ‘has dug his hole so deeply now, I don’t know if he can pull himself out.’
In fact, the last Gallop tracking poll (Wednesday night) showed Romney and Obama tied with 47% of the vote each.
So what’s going on here?
Tabloid journalism.
Whether it’s MSNBC, CNN or Fox News, tabloids – even the electronic version – feed on drama. Every night they need crisis and if a crisis doesn’t exist they’ll invent one. After all, they can’t report night after night that the polls didn’t change.
So watch the story line. I expect it may run: Romney Stumbles, Romney Falls, Romney Rallies, Polls Tied Again.
But don’t confuse that with the facts.
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Carter Wrenn posted on September 26, 2012 15:26
It’s a fad: Paul Ryan put his mother on TV, then David Rouzer put his grandmother on TV, then Tom Murray (who’s running for State House) put his mother in a TV ad. So which will folks say, ‘No one knows him better than his mother’ – or – ‘Does that mean he couldn’t get anyone except his mother to say something good about him?
David Rouzer has also done another ad people might look at two ways.
Back in 2008 two white-haired gentlemen sat down on a porch in a pair of rocking chairs and made a TV ad for Kay Hagan that all but sunk Liddy Dole. Two years later, the same two white-haired gentlemen reappeared, rocking and saying they’d made a mistake last election and this time they were voting for Senator Richard Burr. It was clever – and humorous and it worked.
Now David Rouzer has put the same two gentlemen in an ad, rocking for him – so will the third time turn out to be a charm or too much of a good thing?
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Carter Wrenn posted on September 25, 2012 13:57
Imagine Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton sitting in a room together, listening to a pollster describing the mythical undecided voter, saying: She’s forty-six years old. She grew up on a farm or in a working class neighborhood. She’s a working mother now with two children, living in the suburbs. She’s pro-choice. And she’s sitting in the pew in church every Sunday.
Obama nods slowly. Mitt Romney scratches his head. And Clinton grins and says, Yeah, I know that girl. I went to high school with a girl like her.
That’s a long way of saying when it comes to undecided voters Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are talking to a concept they heard from a pollster – while Bill Clinton is talking to a woman he’s met and known.
For example, when the archetypical suburban working mother sees Romney’s new ad about China’s currency manipulation she may think, At last, he’s talking about an issue I care about – but, then again, she may also furrow her brow and sigh, Why on earth is he talking about the Yuan?
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Gary Pearce posted on September 25, 2012 10:40
The worst wounds in politics are self-inflicted. After a week, it’s clear that Mitt Romney inflicted a doozy on himself when he got carried away about the “47 percent” at that high-flying Florida fundraiser.
Voters today are sophisticated consumers of political messages. They know political ads lie. They know that every word a candidate says in a speech, debate or interview is polished and poll-tested.
So their antennae are up for the slightest sign of a candidate showing what he or she is really like – whether it’s under pressure, by mistake or “off the record.”
Romney gave Americans that inadvertent and possibly fatal glimpse of his real self. He cemented the image that Obama’s ads suggested: a rich, callous man who is not only out of touch with most Americans, but actually holds them in contempt.
Even worse for Romney, the camera angle and poor quality of the videotape are even more damning, because they’re real. The waiters in black vests are a special touch.
This campaign has six weeks to go. A lot can happen. But if Romney were a car, he’d be the 2012 version of the Democrat’s 2004 John Kerry model.
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Carter Wrenn posted on September 24, 2012 18:10
It’s been a long hard fought political war – for years the folks over at the Civitas Institute have been racing the liberals at Public Policy Polling (who seem to be able to churn out a poll every five minutes) to see who could bombard the newspapers with the most propaganda disguised as polling.
Not long ago the Civitas Institute gained the upper hand when the New York Times reported that PPP’s polls had a “house effect” (which is a nice way to say a bias) favoring Democrats. But then, unfortunately, the wheel came off Civitas’ cart too. They released a poll showing Mitt Romney with a ten point lead (53% to 43%) over Barack Obama in North Carolina which sounded fine – until a reporter spotted a glitch: The poll had 30% of the African-Americans voting for Mitt Romney over Obama.
This is all more or less politics as usual but it may have added a new aphorism to the American lexicon. For years we’ve heard, “The check’s in the mail” and “Don’t worry, you won’t get pregnant” – now PPP and Civitas have also given us, “Our scientific poll shows…”
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Gary Pearce posted on September 24, 2012 12:14
I’m just back from several days in Northern California: spectacular rocky coastlines, innumerable wineries, gut-wrenching mountain roads, falling-apart expressways, low humidity, bohemian lifestyles – and no presidential election.
That’s an exaggeration. They have an election, too. But no suspense. California’s 55 electoral votes are already counted toward Obama’s goal of 270. He and Mitt Romney go there only to raise money.
There are no candidate visits, no surrogate visits, no get-out-the-vote drives, no grassroots offices, no candidate ads, no superPAC ads, no ads about Romney and the 47 percent (which, the way he’s going, will be the vote he gets in November), no ads attacking Obama, nothing.
We did run into a street-side Romney booth in San Francisco. “We need to get rid of this guy Obama,” one of the young workers said. He didn’t have many takers. It seemed about as productive as hawking anti-Roy Williams petitions on Franklin Street.
Today, we have a system in which only a handful of states – this year, about nine – matter in the presidential race. North Carolina used to be like California: ignored. But now we’re a battleground. Our votes actually will decide who becomes President! What a concept.
It reminded me of a California-based group – National Popular Vote – that devised an ingenious, if somewhat hard to explain, way of making sure the national popular vote decides presidential elections. It still retains the electoral college system, and it avoids the insuperable hurdle of a constitutional amendment.
Their bill got some traction here before 2008. Carter and I worked with them, and we were intrigued. But it was hard to overcome partisan suspicions about who would benefit. The effort fizzled.
You should check out their plan. NPV is about halfway to the goal of making it happen – and fundamentally changing presidential elections in America.
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Carter Wrenn posted on September 24, 2012 11:20
In the Senate race in Virginia George Allen debated Tim Kaine the other night and right off moderator David Gregory – thinking of Mitt Romney and the 47% – pointed out one million Virginians do not pay any taxes. Then asked Kaine, Do you believe everyone should pay something?
In other words, he asked Kaine if he agreed with the Tea Party’s position – and challenged Kaine to take a tougher stand than Mitt Romney on taxing the 47%.
To everyone’s surprise Kaine said Yes – he was open to the idea of a minimum tax.
So what happened?
The next morning the National Republican Senate Committee put out a press release blasting Kaine, telling voters he wants to “raise taxes on everyone in Virginia.”
And that’s how politics works.
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