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Pollster John Zogby: "Clearly, Palin is helping the McCain ticket. She has high favorability numbers, and has unified the Republican Party. The striking thing here in this poll is that McCain has pulled ahead among Catholics by double-digits. On the other hand, Palin is not helping with likely voting women who are not aligned with either political party. The undecided independent women voters decreased this week from 15% to 7%, but those women went to Obama. Palin is also helping among men, conservatives, notably with suburban and rural voters, and with frequent Wal-Mart shoppers, who tend to be "values" voters who like a good value for their money."
More critically, in one poll Mr. McCain is ahead double digits in likely voters, and had significantly increased the enthusiasm of his party base.
As Mr. Zogby noted, the reason for this is primarily Ms. Palin. Certainly, Mr. McCain sways few people with his oration, and even less so when contrasted with Mr. Obama. However, people just plain like Ms. Palin, especially those who Mr. McCain was targeting. These are the Clinton voters who he had a chance to grab, working class people who never really liked Mr. Obama, but who had no reason to vote for Mr. McCain. They couldn't relate to him. But they can relate to Ms. Palin.
Once again I must congratulate Mr. McCain on a VP choice that was nothing short of brilliant. She did everything he could have hoped for, and more, by both energizing the base, and stealing a huge chunk of Clinton Democrats. Maybe not those who first were assumed, but maybe even better.
If Mr. McCain wins this election, and it is very far from over, he owes an enormous debt to Ms. Palin.
3 comments:
I would have been pretty indifferent about this polling data BEFORE the republician convention. But now, I feel frustrated and disgusted that the McCain and Palin are getting a bump out of what I thought was a set of pretty dishonest and negative speeches. Frank Rich has a great column today in the NYT stating in which he links to this site: http://www.factcheck.org/
elections-2008/factchecking_mccain.html
about some of the inaccuracies in McCain's speech. It is harder to quantify flippancy and derisiveness, but I frankly found Palin's glib dismissal of Obama's experience and policies to be completely over the top, to say nothing of hypocritical. But it appears their was very effective. Who knew that was what people want out of politics?
I think most modern politicians are guilty of at least stretching the truth.
For instance, here is the corresponding link for Obama: http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/factchecking_obama.html
As far as Palin, I admit my bias, she's one of my favorite mainstream politicians so far. That being said, her negativity was in part retaliatory, as she was absolutely slandered by the media and the DNC. Obama has gotten his share of slander from the far right, but nowhere near as bad as Palin got from network and cable news and actual democratic figures. The VP is also traditionally the attack dog of the campaign.
I actually think a lot of the bounce is due to the media and democratic attacks on her backfiring. People relate to her far more than anyone else in the race.
Don't get me wrong, as I said in a comment on the last post, I think the Republicans are better at dirty politics. But not due to a lack of effort by the democrats.
McCain's choice of Governor Palin was indeed a good one. Even the Washington Post had a positive editorial about her yersterdy, concluding, "...Ms. Palin's outflanking of the oil companies injected some competition and urgency into a process that was previousl stalled. Perhaps her Democratic opponent for the governorship in 2006, who campaigned on similar ideas, would have achieved these results. Nevertheless, Ms. Palin actually did."
Similarly, the Washington Post has run a series over the past several days on the development of the surge strategy in Iraq, which notes that the person who initiated the review of the previously failing military process was young Meghan O'Sullivan, the Deputy National Security Adviser. I am glad that nobody dismissed her just because she is younger, more experienced, and more attractive than the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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