Battle of the Guys People Like
The conventional wisdom about this campaign is that in some sense it “should” naturally fall into Barack Obama’s lap. It might not, though, because people have “doubts” about Obama. Thus his task is to “introduce himself” to the American people and cross some threshold of basic acceptability. But as this chart from Charles Franklin shows, that may not be right:
This makes a lot of sense. Before this campaign started, John McCain was the most popular politician in America and Barack Obama was a widely admired rising political star. The result, as this graph shows, is that the key contested voting block seems to be voters who like both McCain and Obama. Despite the press’s obsession with a small number of die-hard Obama-hating Clinton fans, Obama has a sixty percent favorable rating. That means the bulk of the people who don’t have a favorable view of Obama are going to be people who are just a lot more conservative than the average voter — people who it would be both difficult and unnecessary for Obama to impress.
Under the circumstances, both candidates have essentially the same task — not to expand their own appeal, which is about as high as you can expect a candidate in a contested race to get — but to cause the center of public opinion to fall out of love with his opponent.
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11 Responses to “Battle of the Guys People Like”
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August 27th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Matt: “but to cause the center of public opinion to fall out of love with his opponent.”
And if you OWN the MSM, as McCain does, who do you think will be most likely to pull that off?
Naturally, it helps to have Obama picking disasters like Biden, and the Administration working to get a war going with Iran - or ratcheting up old Cold War tensions with Russia just to emphasize your “war hero” cred.
Obama is smoked, folks.
August 27th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Isn’t “striver” an utterly odd (and very infrequently used) word for the headline of this Jodi Kantor story about Obama in the NYT? (the business about Obama’s “seeming” intentions with his note at the Wailing Wall is kind of weird too)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/us/politics/28obama.html?hp
August 27th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
This analysis makes sense to me on a purely anecdotal level. Earlier this week my neighbor finally got around to covering his Bush/Cheney ‘04 bumper sticker with an Obama ‘08 sticker.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Matt,
Nice work on the last several posts. Keep ‘em coming.
By the way, I find your political and foreign policy posts much more readable than your posts involving supply/demand/price economics.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Why fight the Republicans on their own ground, which is phony “personality” issues? McCain starts with a big plus from his heroic POW experience, like it or not. Why not focus on the issues, which include the failure of the Iraq war (and this is what people don’t like - the message should be that Bush and the Republicans are “losers” of this war) and the economy, and McCain’s association with Bush? The Obama campaign is working on the Bush angle, but not doing much on the economy.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:59 am
The premise of the 60/40 math in this post is that the 40% group are the same 40% that represent McCain’s baseline of support. This is a false premise. Virtually every Republican I know, and most I see on TV, readily admits that Obama’s very appealing and that they, in fact, like him. Most then follow up with some set of dealbreaker issues like abortion, taxes, or the Supreme Court, and claim that their personal affinity for Obama does not outweigh their strong feelings about that issue. But I suspect all of them would say they have a favorable impression of him.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:50 am
So, is the 0.8% margin by which Obama’s popularity exceeds McCain’s the reason for concern that Obama is leading a dangerous cult of personality which positions him as a totalitarian dictator, and possibly the Antichrist/Beast of the Apocalypse of the Tribulation Dispensation?
I wonder what the confidence bounds are on those polls anyway: I hope we have the right guy pegged as the Beast.
August 28th, 2008 at 7:08 am
It will be hard to turn independents against McCain as a person. By far the easier sale is that McCain is an honourable person, but one who is stuck in the past, doesn’t understand the problems America is facing, and unable to move the country forward. If this line succeeds people may still have favourable opinions of McCain even as they vote Obama. It’s McCain who really does need to turn voters against Obama to have a chance of winning.
August 28th, 2008 at 7:50 am
No.
August 28th, 2008 at 9:17 am
I believe Bush had higher favorables than Gore through most of the election season and yet he got less votes. These types of polls don’t matter and certainly matter less than the ‘how you will vote’ polls. It all comes down to who has the better ground game in the swing states. Just because you think of someone favorably doesn’t mean you will vote for them or vote at all, much less get your family and friends to head to the polls and vote for your guy.
Like Charles Barkley said about actually voting for a black man versus saying you would vote for a black when the microphone is in your face plays to McCain’s advantage in these polls. People aren’t going to say they hate McCain to some anonymous person on the phone because it would look bad to say you dislike a ‘war hero’ even if he is a crazy, belligerent one.
August 28th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
People have been having doubts about him, but I think he’s doing well in introducing himself to the people. During the Democratic Convention he did well in portraying himself as having strong family values.