The Glade 4.0

Since the Obama/Romney debate, there's been a really significant shift in the polls to Romney's favor. And it's not just the overall totals. Even among demographics where Obama had a huge lead, Romney has made up the ground (e.g. women, who previously favored Obama by as much as 18 points, are now basically split evenly). I don't get it. I mean, I know Obama did a lousy job at the debate and Romney did a good job, but I would think that most people who care enough to watch the debates are already pretty well-informed voters with established opinions of the candidates and their platforms. I can't imagine many of those people would change their mind based on a debate performance. And the so-called low-information voters / undecideds probably wouldn't bother to tune in anyway.

So what's going on? Am I wrong about who watches the debates and/or how much the debates can change even informed people's minds? Is the constant media coverage of a shift in momentum becoming self-fulfilling? Were there actually a lot more undecideds and wavering Obama-supporters than the pre-debate polls showed? Or is the timing of the shift just coincidental vis-a-vis the debate and there's actually something else driving it?

And note that this isn't about me being shocked that Obama, the Great and Powerful, could be losing. It's the sudden shift, and its apparent relationship to the debate, that surprises/confuses me.

Most people who will vote in the general election START paying attention at the debates.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

What Elmo said. People are now tallying promises made versus promises kept, progress made versus stagnation and coming down on the side of "oops".

I'm still not voting for Romney or Obama.

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They don't tune in, but they hear all the talking heads proclaim how badly Obama "lost" the debate.

The media fixes our elections, 4-page Voting Fraud threads notwithstanding. They do so because they're prodded to by the DNC and RNC, who know that the elections are decided by people who can't be bothered to actually inform themselves of policy or platform, and instead align themselves by color and "electability." The media are the ones who provide the "electability" portion.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

The debates are also the first time most people will see the candidates without the prism of journalistic spin. No golden Halo for Obama (or golden teleprompter). No devil's horns on Rommney. Jerktastic smirks from Biden. This is the real impressions that the average non (dedicated partisan) voter gets.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Relax, everyone. Our man Obeezy is still winning. It would be extremely humiliating if the first black president didn't win a second term, and only racists would want that to happen. Romney is committing a hate crime just by running against him, and come November everyone is going to realize that.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

RD:

It's the first time Romney's been able to challenge, directly, Obama's presentation of Romney. When challenged, it collapsed (in part due to weakness, in part due to poor debate performance). Further, the country saw Romney laying out a plan for the future. Obama has not done this. He's focused his energy on Romney's plan and how it's bad, but not on his own plans. On top of this, his criticism of Romney's "bad plan" was poorly executed during the debate.

I keep hearing about how Obama is going to be more aggressive and attack Romney at the debate. This will not work. He needs to lay out a plan. All he's done is attack Romney and defend himself for his performance over the last four years. What about the next four years?

"We'll talk about it after I'm elected" is not a plan.

http://www.romneytaxplan.com/

Nice job DNC. What is Obama's plan? Shhhh! Go see Romney's above!

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LOL!

I think that the fact is that a lot of people's opinions are not all that well-established. I think that most people distrust the media, they distrust the campaign adds, and most likely will say the incumbent is their preference prior to the debates just because they won't change horses otherwise.

The debates are their opportunity to see the candidates in each other's presence and with a minimum of staged interference. It isn't just "debate performance" in a sense of picking a winner like the debate itself is the issue, but rather they see a poor debate performance as the candidate having poorly-thought-out ideas.

I think the Libya thing has also contributed, and it's not just the debate, but I think that people who have strong political opinions tend to have very poor ideas about how undecided voters think. In particular, I don't think there's any reason to think less-informed or undecided voters won't watch. For a lot of those people, the debates are the only part of the campaign that aren't intolerable to watch.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

+1

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I think it's mostly this, with a twist.

Prior to the debates, the only people paying any attention to the election (for the most part) were the party cores. As far as that goes, Obama polls well with the hardcore Democrats. No one in the Republican core likes Romney -- neither the neocons nor the tea party types. But they know full well that the Republican core doesn't matter, especially in this election. They'll vote for NotObama(TM) no matter how much they hate him. Romney is a candidate of desperation, selected not because they like him but because they believe he has the best chance of grabbing moderate/centrist votes away from Obama.

Which brings us to the post-debate polls. The general public is starting to tune in, and it looks like the Republican strategy was correct. Moderates, it seems, do actually lean more towards Romney than Obama.

And, of course, there's the old standby explanation of incumbent advantage. Obama has had a 4-year pulpit for his policies. To the extent that people outside of the core were even answering polls prior to the debates, many or most of them were probably just automatically siding with the incumbent because they haven't really given it much thought, and the incumbent's view is the only thing they've had much exposure to. So we shouldn't be surprised that he polls significantly higher at the beginning than he does at the end. The debates are kind of the first opportunity for the two candidates to publicize on roughly even footing.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Some of us who fit into the category of Republicans you described were still rather pleased with the Romney we saw in the first debate. I don't know if that has anything to do with the uptick or not.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I still hold that Romney was picked explicitly to lose.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Yes, but did anyone tell him that.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Last time we had a "picked-to-lose" candidate, we ended up with 8 years of President Bush.

Which led to the over-reaction of voting for somone like Obama.

I now blame Bush for the fact that he caused the country to vote Obama.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

So everything Obama does really IS Bush's fault!

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No, we ended up with Barrack Obama.

McCain/Palin was a non-starter from the word go. It's ok, though, people are still blaming Bush for Obama's failures.

Bush wasn't President when the DOJ started entrapping people into terrorism charges while bragging about it.

Bush wasn't President when Barack Obama started lying about unemployment.

Bush wasn't President when Barack Obama nationalized General Motors. By the by, the U.S. Federal government is still the majority shareholder of private shares and maintains its controlling interest in the boardroom. The current public share pool for GM is less than its positive equity at the moment. And Bush certainly wasn't President when Obama lied about taking the U.S. Government out of GM.

Bush wasn't President during the Arab Spring.

Bush didn't appoint the Diplomatic Corps guy who was selling weapons out of the Libyan embassy.

Bush didn't tell bald-faced lies about Ambassador Stevens's death for weeks and week.

Bush wasn't President for the two unannounced rounds of quantitative easing that have happened in the last 18 months.

Bush wasn't President when we put a full combat-support battalion on the ground for air strikes in Libya (contrary to Obama's repeated assertion there were no American ground troops in Libya.)

Bush wasn't President when Barack Obama summarily changed the payroll tax collection rates and then blamed their revenue reduction on his predecessor.

Bush wasn't President when the Bush Tax Cuts were bad. Bush wasn't President when the Bush Tax Cuts were good. Bush wasn't President when the Bush Tax Cuts were causing a revenue shortfall. Bush wasn't President when a Pelosi controlled house extended those Tax Cuts at least 3 times after Obama's election, with Obama's signature on the bills.

Bush wasn't President when Michelle Obama totally flubbed the gift protocol of the Queen of England's visit.

Bush wasn't President at any point in 2012 or 2011 or 2010 or after January 20, 2009. So why the **** are you guys still voting against Bush?

He was a bad President, but the current guy is WORSE.

I'd much rather have a Yale Educated, Texas businessman, New Hampshire Liberal Republican, 'yokel' than the white-washed demagogue that promised transparency and delivered the most opaque administration in U.S. history.

I'd much rather have Bush then what we have now ...

And I hated both Bush Presidencies.

Stop voting against Bush. He hasn't been the President for 4 years.

And, honestly, I think Hopwin posted all you need to know about Obama and his party.

They're trying to play off an attack-site as part of Romney's official web presence.

**** the False Dilemma.

Vote Write-In, if your state allows it.

And vote for ...

"No confidence in the government of the United States."

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Your soapbox is nice and sturdy and...um, wooden (I guess), but that was in no way my point.

I do humbly apologize Mr. Sky if you felt that was specifically directed at you. I have no idea who you are supporting. You are more libertarian than liberal; and less Republican than Democrat. You supported Obama the first time; you even introduced him to the Glade by saying you wish guys like him would run for President back on the original incarnation of the Glade (Post-Sunmoon before EZBoard or whatever we went to next) ...

As for who you are supporting this time: you have not said, but I know that you will have a reasoned position on who you will vote for and why. I may not agree with it, and probably won't if it's an R or D, but hey ...

I do know you give it more thought than most.

But, all of that said, the post is more of my general lament with American politics. We're still talking about Bush. We're not talking about policy. And we're not trying to dismantle the **** political parties that obviously think they should have more say in who is the **** President of the United States than the delegates legally and electorally appointed by the various States.

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I appreciate the compliments. My point, though, wasn't anything about President Bush's efficacy or legacy. It was only that Bush was meant to be a placeholder; with Clinton's popularity and success, and his VP running, it was widely expected that Al Gore would easily take the presidency. Republicans put up Bush as a mulligan to make a real go of it in 2004, when the Clinton glow had faded from Gore. It just so happened that Bush was not only elected president, but proved popular enough (and the Democrats' candidate in '04 unappetizing enough, as they ran on kind of the inverse of the Bush strategy, assuming anyone but Bush would be enough to take the presidency) to win a second term. Just proving that sometimes the "picked to lose" strategy doesn't alway pan out.

Picked to lose can't work if the dilemma isn't real in the first place. At least, that's where I am with all of this.

I fear they all actually do need to be ... eliminated as options to hold office. I simply have no idea how to motivate enough people with enough sense to cogitate on the color paisley ...

That ~175,000,000 ballots need to be cast against EVERY incumbent in office.

If they currently hold office, they should not be re-elected. If they are running unopposed, write-in <incumbent shall vacate seat>.

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DFK!?

DFK!'s political stance for the past ~decade I've known him has been summed up in three words: Vote Out Incumbents. When he infect you?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades