In politics it is generally not considered a good sign when voters are laughing at you, not with you. And by the end of the third and last presidential debate, the undecided voters who had gathered in Denver for Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg’s focus group were “audibly snickering” at John McCain’s grimaces, eye-bulging, and repeated references to “Joe the Plumber.”
The group of 50 uncommitted voters should have at least been receptive to McCain—Republicans and Independents outnumbered Democrats in the group by almost 4 to 1, and they started the evening with much warmer responses to McCain than to his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. But by the time it was all over, so few of them had declared their support for McCain that there weren’t enough for Greenberg to separate them into a post-debate focus group. Meanwhile, the Obama supporters had to assemble in two different rooms to keep their discussion groups manageable.
Half of the voters thought that Obama “won” the debate, with 24% giving McCain the victory and 26% seeing no clear winner.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Debate wrap
From TIME's Amy Sullivan, here:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
From Ezra: Update: Stan Greenberg's focus group sees more decisive movement towards Obama than in any of the previous debates. Greenberg began with an audience tilted towards McCain. 54 percent saw McCain favorably, 34 percent saw him unfavorably. By the end of the night, McCains favorables had dropped to 50 percent, and his unfavorables had shot up 14 points, to 48 percent. Meanwhile, Obama began at 42 percent favorable and 42 percent unfavorable. By the night's end, his favorables had jumped 30 percent, to 72 percent, and his unfavorables had plummeted to 22 percent.
Post a Comment