October 16, 2008 1:43
From TIME's Amy Sullivan:
... 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 ...
... Once again, the focus group dials dove whenever McCain went on the attack, particularly when he talked about Bill Ayers and ACORN in what turned out to be the longest segment of the evening. The audience that started out giving McCain a 54/24 favorability rating (and, incidentally, liked Sarah Palin a lot more than Joe Biden, with +6 and -20 splits) ended up almost evenly divided between warm and cool feelings toward him (50/48).
Obama started off with a lower, and divided, favorability rating (42/42) that climbed to 72/22 after 90 minutes. “Boring” and “zzzzz” were popular reviews of Obama’s performance from blogosphere pundits, but apparently the people have had enough excitement watching the market plummet and are in the mood for some mellowness ...
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/10/undecideds_laughing_at_not_wit.html
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