Via the NYT: Poll Says McCain Hurts His Bid by Using Attacks – NYTimes.com
The McCain campaign’s recent angry tone and sharply personal attacks on Senator Barack Obama appear to have backfired and tarnished Senator John McCain more than their intended target, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, although I suppose it must be to the campaign strategist who devised the attacks. I noted late last week:
While this [personal attack strategy] may (like the Palin selection) get the base excited, it ultimately undercuts McCain’s basic appeal (i.e., the straight-talking, honest maverick who puts country first and is the serious grownup in this campaign). Also in re: the base, I would note that McCain cannot win on a base mobilization strategy the way Bush did, as the base is currently too small to accomplish that goal. As such, not only does this strategy demonstrate desperation and undercut McCain, it is bad politics as this will not bring the undecideds to McCain’s camp, and he desperately needs them to win.
Back to the survey:
Six in 10 voters surveyed said that Mr. McCain had spent more time attacking Mr. Obama than explaining what he would do as president; by about the same number, voters said Mr. Obama was spending more of his time explaining than attacking.
[...]
voters who said that their views of Mr. McCain had changed were three times more likely to say that they had worsened than to say they had improved.
And by the way, back to those who gave me grief over predicting that the Palin pick would likely hurt McCain in the end:
The top reasons cited by those who said they thought less of Mr. McCain were his recent attacks and his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.
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October 15th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Complete nonsense! Barry Hussein Obama presents a clear and present danger to the existence of the USA as we have known it for over 200 years!
There is a vast machine operating that conspires to elect this Marxist radical in spite of the fact that over 50% of America is just to the right of center! ACORN, Soros, foreign “contributions” worth millions, and the full aid and cooperation of the drive by media (aka MSM) may thwart the efforts of good honest hard working Americans to save their country. It’s time to take action against all of those that are trying to destroy America.
October 15th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Help me out here: is your comment supposed to be satire, or are you serious?
October 15th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Yeah, I couldn’t tell if that was sarcasm or not either. The scary thought, however, is that some people are actually that radical in thought. Since when is voting for another American citizen dangerous or scary? Perhaps we all don’t agree on issues, but are certain people seriously this brainwashed to think our country is in danger if either of these candidates is elected? Get real…
October 15th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Another example of an attempt by a mindless Obama-lover to try to dissuade McCain from going on the attack in the final two weeks of the election. The fact of the matter is that the mainstreammedia has failed miserably at vetting this virtual unknown. Go get ‘em McCain!
October 15th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Well this “radical” is a middle class, Big ten and Ivy League educated small business owner. You, Chris, and “Doctor” Taylor are apparently the Kool Aid drinkers here.
Voting for Barry Hussein Obama is scary because his primary agenda is to destroy capitalism. He has followed, consorted with, admired, supported and been supported by left wing radicals, Marxists, socialists, and communists.
October 15th, 2008 at 11:58 am
[...] posts that caught my eye this morning. Particularly, he’s discussing how McCain’s negative campaigning has backfired. (It’s a point I touched on yesterday.) And then there’s an amusing read about how [...]
October 15th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
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October 15th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
He has followed, consorted with, admired, supported and been supported by left wing radicals, Marxists, socialists, and communists.
Exactly Ricardo! Like his main economic adviser, Austin Goolsbee who teaches in the den of radicalism otherwise known as the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business!
I know that his Lenin-esque pamphlets like the one on “The Consumer Gains from Direct Broadcast Satellites and the Competition with Cable Television” are harbingers for the inherent communism that Comrade Obama is likely to promote.
October 15th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
WHY IS IT THAT ANY TIME JOHN MC CAIN PRESENT AN ADDRESS HE MUST HAVE A PIECE OF PAPER WHERE HE WROTE ALL HE WANT TO SAY COMPARED TO BARACK OBAMA
October 15th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
WHY IS IT THAT ANY TIME JOHN MC CAIN PRESENT AN ADDRESS HE MUST HAVE A PIECE OF PAPER WHERE HE WROTE ALL HE WANT TO SAY
CYRIL:
BECAUSE HE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO USE A COMPUTER! HE NEEDS TO BE EDUCATED ON THE ADVANTAGES OF ALL-CAPS TYPING FOR HIS WEARY, 72-YEAR OLD EYES!
October 15th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
The interesting question to me is why McCain’s negative ads are a turnoff for more voters than they’re a turn-on. It’s not like negative ads never work. The answer I’m coming to is: team spirit. By which I mean, the vox pop has decided that Obama is their guy. His favorables are extremely high in all recent polling. So negative ads are simply McCain trying to tear down their guy. The story the “drive by MSM” has really missed this election, IMHO, is just this: that while they were waiting for Obama’s [whatever] to turn voters off, voters were bonding with the guy. Now it’s too late for McCain to budge them. He just pisses Americans off because he’s being mean to their guy.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
This is a classic, glaring example of why I hate, hate, HATE polls.
While I think it has probably hurt McCain to go so heavy on the attacks, I can’t see this poll as a real number; the methodology is questionable to me. Yeah, I think probably a lot of people are turned off by these attacks, but after looking over the provided information about how the poll was conducted, and the data that they published, I can’t see this as a number that has any meaning. It’s a classic example of what I find loathesome about polls.
If you clicky click on the link to the PDF file of the actual poll numbers you find that the question the Times reported on about the attack ads was one of the rotating questions. Not everyone in the poll was asked this question – and the poll was small to begin with (only 1,070).
They don’t tell us how the rotating was done exactly, except to say that questions 54-55 were rotated with 56-57. If we assume it was half and half, then you’re looking at 535 respondents; for what it is, that is a small sample size, especially when you consider that the attack ads have been distributed differently on a geographic basis.
If you clicky click on the other link about how the poll was conducted, it explains that responses were weighted according to race, marital status, whether the number dialed was a landline or a cell phone, and a host of other things.
The pollster did not provide us with the raw data for most of the questions. What we are seeing is a percentage that has been tinkered with according to a complex polling alchemy, wherein a response from a person on a landline counted for more than a response from a person on a cell phone. Why? Who knows. An awful lot of people don’t have landlines these days. I think the polster believes that a landline means a bigger household, but does it?
Now, this is part of why I hate polls. They almost never give you the raw data: how many people actually said what to which question. They take that data, tinker around with it, and present us with some other number that their voodoo magic has rendered. I wish they would supply us with the raw data along with their interpretation, but we seldom get that.
I think if we looked at the real numbers (how people actually responded) the number would likely be different. Think about it this way – the pollster weighted responses according to the size of the state of the respondent. We don’t know how this weighting was done – but let’s assume bigger states get more weight than smaller. What that means is that someone in Ohio, with 20 electoral votes, counts more than someone in Georgia, with 15 votes, presumably 25% or so. The problem with this is that Ohio is being inundated with attack ads (being a swing state) and Georgia is getting almost none (being blood red). So the person in Georgia, who is probably less likely to have seen a lot of attack ads – their response is diminished, and the response of the person from Ohio who can’t go anywhere without seeing one is magnified. That is a problem to me when you’re trying to create a national average; if you’re trying to establish opinions on a regional basis, fine – but that’s not what the goal of the poll was.
I would bet that there is a correlation between the number of times a person sees an attack ad, and how negative their response to it is. I can’t prove this empirically right now, but I bet I could do so if I had the time and inclination. To me the weighting of states becomes problematic, and the validity of the practice contestable. We also don’t know what weight the pollsters gave to race, gender, and other things. We can’t decide for ourselves whether that weighting is valid.
Basically what I’m getting at is that I think there are problems with weighting poll responses – especially with small sample sizes, and especially when we are not told how that weighting was done.
And I’m not going to suggest a conspiracy here, but it is entirely plausible that in any of the polls we see, one of the individuals doing the tinkering could deliberately skew the data – since the pollsters don’t think we the public are smart enough to handle raw data, they don’t give it to us. They’re basically telling us what to think.
I don’t trust or accept as valid any poll that does not provide me with the real data. If it’s been filtered, and that’s all I get – it’s junk. And there is danger in publishing these polls, the methodology of which can vary enormously from one pollster to the next. A pollster could be using a bad technique which yields a greater spread than there really is; I think this can impact voter behavior. If your guy is down 10 points you might think it’s a waste to go out in the rain to vote for him; but what if that poll is off by 4 or 5, and the spread is really lower? Might you go out and vote if it’s a 5 point margin? What is the threshold where people start staying home because they think it’s a hopeless cause? Is it 8 points? 5? 7? If there were no polls at all, how would that affect voting behavior?
We take too many polls, and they are published all too often without giving us the ability to hold them up to academic scrutiny; they are sold to us at face value, and we are told to just trust the pollsters because they know what they’re doing. What I hate about polling isn’t the polling itself – it’s the interpretation that the pollsters apply to the data, and then feed to us as if it’s the real deal, when what we’re really getting is a projection based on that guy’s algorithm. . . which is often a secret. If there was more tranpsarency, I’d be OK with it.
In any case, the fact that the New York Times ran it is enough reason to question its reliability, as the Times has degenerated in journalistic credibility greatly over the last couple of decades. Again, I’m not suggesting conspiracies – I’m just saying, as an institution, it is not what it used to be. I can think of uses for it – lining the cat’s litter box, maybe toilet paper in a pinch – but as an information product, I’d put it somewhere between a supermarket tabloid and an unapologetically liberal blog. It’s simply not a good, reliable, trustworthy information product. A lot of Times journalists are just plain sloppy, and the ownership is unapologetically liberal.
CBS is even worse. These are both institutions that will do anything they can to promote Obama and diminish McCain, and have proven themselves to be poor conduits of information. These institutions need to prove themselves in the information they provide; without publishing the raw survey data so that we can look at their weighting policies and decide for ourselves what to make of the results, I can’t take it seriously.
This is a research paper with no citations and no bibliography – only a brief explanation of how the survey was conducted that says something to the effect of “We know what we’re doing, just listen to us.”
That’s just plain insulting.
October 15th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
The interesting question to me is why McCain’s negative ads are a turnoff for more voters than they’re a turn-on.
I think a lot of it is not just Obama’s obvious popularity, but the fact that McCain attacks are personal and somewhat amorphous, rather than being direct policy attacks.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Captain D: You realize that in less than three weeks we’ll have an actual election and the results will be the results right? At that point the weird propensity to spin out nebulous theories about poll methodologies at great length will be irrelevant.
October 15th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Mr. Henley,
Yes, I realize there will be an election. And the results will be the results.
I’m not sure exactly what it is that you were trying to tell me. Is it your position that it is pointless or stupid to discuss the relative merits of different polling methods?
Certainly in an academic forum, it is reasonable to discuss such things. If you don’t have anything to contribute, don’t contribute; but I was taught to question information that I am presented with. That’s all I’m doing; and my theories are no more “nebulous” than the results of this poll. I was not discussing the election; I was discussing the practice of polling, which was the subject of the blog. The pending election simply happens to be the subject of the poll. I would have had the same response if the poll was about America’s favorite flavor of ice cream.
It is in the best interests of a democracy to question information products, whether they be polls, newspapers, blogs, or TV anchors. None of these information products should have a free pass to present information without it having to stand up to academic scrutiny.
If you think people should just sit down, shut up, listen to and believe everything they’re told, that’s fine – but don’t expect me to do that.
And maybe I’m wrong, but I believe these polls do influence voter behavior. Consequent to that, it is fair and reasonable for me to question how these polls are conducted, and important to our democracy for us to discuss them. If you don’t like it, I have some blueberry pie which you can put in your pie hole while the adults have their conversation.
You are right about the election, in a roundabout way. It will come and go, and render all these thousands upon thousand of polls moot; my discussion of those polls – either way the election goes, I still have the same gripes. This isn’t about who is ahead to me; it’s about the quality of information we are given.
I think it’s a good thing to talk about that.
October 15th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Mr. Maxwell ~ Your credibility would be greatly improved if you would cite anything to back up your claims. During my time in public schools and a short stint in community college, I was always required to cite my sources.
I’m pretty sure they teach the same in the Big 10, Ivy League schools, no?
Captain ~ I also hate polls. So I guess we agree on something. I hate them for a different reason though; they have had the tendency in past elections of causing complacency on one side, and increased vigor on the other.
More people need to understand that these polls are designed to describe trends, rather than actual percentages.
As an Obama supporter, I am actually getting more nervous as his poll numbers go up.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:55 am
I actually like the roundtable quality of these forums, less right to left and more about the passion of the voters reactions. By the time Obama and McCain won the nominations, I felt satisfied that two intelligent men were vying for No. 1, as it washed away the Bush Theatre’s 8 years of gross negligence and indifference.
However, McCain is campaigning by the same clock as Obama, but Obama has simply made far better use of his time in the campaign. The expression on McCain’s face is one of intense fear because he is beginning to realize that, by going for the jugular, he has distanced himself even more from the pulse of the voting public as well as from the crises we face as Nov. 4 draws near. Again, it was an equal race in the beginning (as the polls indicated), but McCain has frittered away the election by very irresponsible, impulsive decisions, and his running mate is his loudspeaker. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Shame to those who think the worst of it.
October 17th, 2008 at 2:15 am
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