Obama's "Celebrity" Counterattack Deemed Ineffective
Consistent with their tit-for-tat strategy of firing back whenever their candidate is attacked, the Obama campaign answered the highly publicized ad portraying Obama as a “celebrity” by producing one of their own that portrayed McCain as a celebrity.
Results just released by HCD Research and the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion indicate that Obama’s response ad didn’t move opinions at all.
The 300 participants in a “national focus group” (I’m not sure exactly what that means) assessed the believability of the ad by scrolling their computer mouse along a believability continuum, and their responses were recorded every quarter of a second. To see these responses as they played out while the ad was playing, click here.
Obviously, responses varied according to the party identification of the respondents, but the broader message was that Obama got no immediate bump from the ad. Before viewing the ad, 74% of the Democrats who participated in the study said they were going to vote for Obama; afterwards, it was still 74%. Among both Republicans and independents, the observed changes were too small to be taken seriously.
As the conventions approach, the media are beginning to report that the Obama campaign may be setting out on a more aggressive approach than it has been pursuing to this point. Instead of concentrating on answering attacks, it looks like they’re gearing up to launch some bombs of their own.
Comments
A lot of people would like celebrity status and may be seeking it, e.g. via YouTube and the like. Some people will sell their souls to become a celebrity, even for 15 nano seconds. And politicians will usually do and say whatever it takes to get elected, e.g. John McCain.
Posted by: Shag from Brookline | August 19, 2008 08:17 AM
Probably because appearing on Late Night or David Letterman is not the same as being compared to Paris or Brittney. Obams didn’t take cheap shots in the same manner as McCain and that’s the difference.
Posted by: Black Political Analysis | August 19, 2008 09:06 AM
is the every quarter second sampling and immediately afterward questioning really that important for this sort of ad? Wouldn’t the effect be more generally about constant exposure to the idea and how this alters candidate perception?
Posted by: BillCinSD | August 19, 2008 01:36 PM
BillCinSD:
No, I don’t think the quarter-second-by-quarter-second sampling says much of anything about the overall impact of the ad (though it’s cool to follow it across the screen). It does say something about which particular parts of the ad people reacted to one way or the other. And as a one-shot study rather than a study of repeated exposure, it speaks only to the immediate impact of first exposure. But in the latter respect, I don’t know of any reason to expect sleeper or boomerang effects, so I’m not too put off by that factor. Anyway, the bottom line is whether the ad had an effect on candidate perceptions or vote intentions, and it doesn’t seem to have. (On the other hand, though I can’t tell from the write-up that I’ve linked to, it looks like a simple pretest-posttest panel design, and I wouldn’t expect anything more than a minor change when the very same people are asked the very same questions within a minute or two.)
Posted by: Lee Sigelman | August 19, 2008 01:57 PM