From TIME's Amy Sullivan:
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/10/undecideds_laughing_at_not_wit.htmlIn politics it is generally not considered a good sign when voters are laughing at you, not with you. And 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.
Half of the voters thought that Obama “won” the debate, with 24% giving McCain the victory and 26% seeing no clear winner. As with previous debates, however, the divergent personal reactions to the candidates were most striking. And those ultimately may end up defining the campaign for McCain. He emerged from the Republican field as the candidate who was least associated with the damaged GOP brand, the one least able to be tied to George W. Bush, and he has largely maintained that image: a large plurality (40%) see McCain as a maverick, and over the course of the evening there was a 52-point shift on the question of whether McCain offered a different path than Bush.
Yet if McCain has proved resistant to the Obama campaign’s mantra that he would be “More of the Same,” the results of focus groups over the past month seem to show that he has hurt his own chances of winning the White House by misreading the emotional mood of the country. 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).