}

Saturday, September 27, 2008

The worm turns

We watched the first US presidential debate on CNN, but I have to admit, my attention was drawn by the worm—the real-time indicator of how the audience reacted to what a speaker was saying. It was kind of fascinating.

Republicans tended to like what McCain said and didn’t like what Obama said. Democrats liked Obama and not McCain. No surprises there. But watching the independents—universally considered an important swing group—McCain got very little favourable reaction; he got the odd positive blip, but mostly the line tracked close to the neutral line.

But things were very different when McCain went negative: Whenever McCain used fear-mongering, the worm turned negative. When McCain adopted a smug and condescending attitude to say that Obama “doesn’t understand” something, the worm turned negative. Whenever McCain focused on Iraq, the worm was, at best, neutral, but more often negative.

Obama, on the other hand, had an almost always positive worm. Sometimes, it was dramatically positive, reaching heights that McCain never even came close to.

So, what does this tell us? First, the McCain campaign and Republican apologists will savage the use of the worm, claiming all sorts of evil-doing. My bet is that they’ll claim it was the result of a Democratic plot. Losers do that sort of desperate thing.

But the main thing we saw was that Independents simply weren’t buying what McCain was selling. At the very best, they were neutral to what he was saying, at worst, they reacted strongly against it.

And one of McCain’s biggest negative drops? That happened when he mentioned Sarah Palin. Clearly the independents thought even less of her.

Personally, I don’t think that the debate illuminated anything. I’m sure that neither Republicans nor Democrats minds were changed. Independents? Too soon to tell, but they couldn’t have been impressed by McCain. You don’t need a worm to tell you that.

6 comments:

Nik said...

I found the worm kinda distracting and a bit silly -- 'instant' reactions don't matter so much as long-term I think -- and I ended up flipping to BBC because it annoyed me so much in the end.

Anonymous said...

When the worm was first introduced to debates in NZ it changed the course of the election. It should not be underestimated.

Michael in Stuttgart said...

When you mentioned the worm, I thought you were talking about McPain

Jason in DC said...

I find watching CNN too distracting there's always some sort of clutter on the screen.

I will say that at the end of it I didn't think either candidate "won" the debate. That seems to be the general reaction from the talking heads as well.

I don't understand why McCain need to put in the digs. He could made the same contrasts without being so snarky. Especially since in all the media run up to the debate everywhere and everyone mentioned can McCain hold his temper and not do exactly what he did.

I think the most important thing is that Obama held his own.

Bottom line this was no game changer one way or the other.

Unknown said...

I too was mesmerized by the squiggly lines. As I mentioned on my debate recap show, the Republican line also rose several times during key Obama moments.

I'm going to have to disagree with Jason's comment that most pundits thought it was a tie. The majority of pundits (at least in written form) gave the debate to Obama handily. Even Frank Luntz's group declared Obama the winner of each individual segment as well as the debate on the whole.

As for it not being a game changer ... no offense, but who the hell are you that you can make that kind of statement slightly more than 24 hours after the event? Instant polling of uncommitted voters showed 40% favored Obama afterward (http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/cbs_news_knowledge_network_und.php)

Intrade has Obama over McCain by 56.6 / 42.0

We will not see the actual effect of the debate on the tracking polls until Monday or Tuesday due to the nature of "rolling-polling".

Arthur Schenck said...

Thank you all for your comments. There were two reasons I didn't talk about who won the debate. The first was that I thought it was obvious that Obama won. But the main reason was that this blog post was about the worm specifically.

To Nik, Anonymous is correct: The worm turned a New Zealand election. It was first used in NZ—though no one remembers it—in the 1996 election. But when it was brought back for the 2002 election, it turned an almost unknown party leader (Peter Dunne of United Future) into a major phenomenon and his party ended up winning far more seats than it would have based on polling prior to that leaders' debate. What's forgotten now is that the worm also helped sink another party, The Alliance (though in that case, other factors were involved, too).

So, the bottom line is that whatever we may think of the worm (and losing party leaders in 2002 complained that it trivialised the election) it does apparently matter to people who see it.

As I said, I think Obama clearly won the debate, so I disagree with Jason on that point. And the pundits I read said Obama won, too (I didn't watch any on TV).

However, I see a middle ground between Jason and Daniel: While Daniel's right that it's too early to see if there was any gain for Obama, I think it's important to remember how seldom debates change anything. The last big shift I remember from a debate was in 1976 when Gerald Ford declared there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe". I admit, though, that I haven't gone out of my way to keep up with research on this.

What I do think will be a game changer is the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden (if it happens). The last two or three people in America who haven't worked out that Palin is moron with dangerous beliefs will know that after that debate. I'm, sure Michael would agree.