2008 Election
nisbetmc | August 29, 2008In running for Governor of Alaska in 2006, GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin said she supported teaching alternatives to evolution. When asked during an election debate, she said:
"Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."
She later attempted to clarify her statement by saying in an interview:
"I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."
She added that, if elected, she would not push the state…
nisbetmc | August 29, 2008
When you pick as a VP candidate someone who is inexperienced and unfamiliar with national politics, you don't know what you are going to get. Above, a look back at Dan Quayle's VP announcement speech in 1988 and then subsequent campaign gaffes.
nisbetmc | August 28, 2008Gore endorsing Obama for the Democratic nomination during the primary campaign.
Standing on stage before a national TV audience at Mile High Stadium, Al Gore was a symbolic reminder of what could have been. He also delivered perhaps the best negative narrative about McCain of the convention. "I believe in recycling, but recycling Bush's policies is ridiculous," Gore told the 70,000 strong crowd.
Yet as I noted last week, what might be good for the convention and the Democratic party is probably not good for Gore's tireless work to mobilize a diversity of Americans on climate change. Indeed,…
nisbetmc | August 27, 2008There's an anti-Obama documentary in release and don't underestimate its potential impact. McCain needs something to intensify his base and research shows that political documentaries--whether Fahrenheit 9/11 or Inconvenient Truth--are fairly good at mobilizing supporters and the already committed.
Not surprisingly, the anti-Obama film (which I won't link to) is getting a fair amount of buzz in the conservative media including the Washington Times which ran a story on Monday. Below is the analysis I provided for the story:
Matthew Nisbet, an assistant professor at American University's…
nisbetmc | August 27, 2008President Bush observing the disaster in New Orleans from Air Force One.
For a campaign that appears to be making all the right moves, Mother Nature might be the one variable that the McCain team can't control. As New Orleans prepares to evacuate three years to the day that Hurricane Katrina hit, Republicans should not be happy.
Indeed, it was Hurricane Katrina that sent the Bush administration's approval ratings plummeting. As I detailed in this blog post back in 2006, Hurricane Katrina suddenly made long standing claims that the Bush administration was out of touch with the facts on the…
nisbetmc | August 27, 2008
The people running John McCain's campaign know what they are doing. By linking their advertising strategy to the news narrative, they continue to successfully counter-punch against an anemic Democratic convention message. The McCain team opened the week with an ad featuring a former Hillary backer now pledging her support for McCain and telling others to join her. The ad immediately reinforced the distracting focus on the Clintons at the Dem convention while also seeking to break the "spiral of silence" among Hillary supporters.
Yesterday they followed with a somewhat clumsily edited but…
nisbetmc | August 26, 2008Adweek asked the creative directors at some of the country's largest advertising agencies to create their own mock up print ads for either McCain or Obama. Read and see what they came up with.
nisbetmc | August 26, 2008
"Well, if this party has a message it has done a hell of a job of hiding it tonight I promise you that," James Carville said on CNN Monday night (see ABC's The Note). "I look at this and I am about to jump out of my chair."
What Carville was referring to was the absence of a negative narrative about John McCain. There was emotion last night with Senator Edward Kennedy's appearance and Michelle Obama scored points by telling her personal story. But as Carville lamented, going back to 2004, the Democrats' streak of not bashing the GOP record at Democratic National Conventions now stands at…
nisbetmc | August 25, 2008
A McCain ad released today features a former Clinton delegate telling fellow Hillary supporters that she plans to vote for John McCain and it's okay for them to do so too.
Strategically, the TV spot looks to break what communication researchers call the "spiral of silence" phenomena, the tendency for a person to be less likely to voice an opinion on a topic if the individual feels that they are in the minority, for fear of reprisal or isolation from that majority. Derived in part from the classic Asch and Milgram conformity experiments, the theory holds that when individuals form an opinion…
nisbetmc | August 24, 2008"New Evangelical" Joel Hunter (blue shirt) works with church members on a recycling campaign.
Evangelical leader Joel C. Hunter, a registered Republican, will give the closing prayer at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, joining Al Gore and nominee Barack Obama on stage in front of 70,000 stadium goers.
Hunter opposes abortion and at one time had been chosen to lead the Christian Coalition. According to the Washington Post, for several years he has been at the forefront of a so-called "New Evangelical" movement dedicated to moving beyond the divisiveness of culture war issues.
"I…
nisbetmc | August 22, 2008Is McCain's "House" Gaffe Similar to George Bush's 1992 "Scanner" Moment?
In his first major negative ad of the campaign, Obama is defining McCain as out of touch with Americans' economic woes. Obama is seizing on McCain's gaffe yesterday when he stumbled over a question about how many homes he owns. "I think -- I'll have my staff get to you," McCain told the reporter. "It's condominiums where -- I'll have them get to you." (Either seven or eight homes, depending on reports.) (Wpost).
The Obama strategy is to define McCain as a wealthy elitist so removed from the day-to-day financial…
nisbetmc | August 20, 2008Rewind 1992: Bush's public approval shifted as the public turned its attention from war to the economy.
As tensions with a newly aggressive Russia escalate, the return of America's Cold War enemy heavily favors McCain's election chances. Here's the reason: The issues that are most salient in voters minds are often the issues by which they are most likely to judge candidates. Political psychologists call this process "priming." The classic example of this priming effect at work was George H.W. Bush's approval ratings during the later half of his presidency (graph above, stu-dies). During the…
nisbetmc | August 19, 2008At the end of July, I predicted that the Edwards affair might turn out to be the dominant news story for August. It turns out I was wrong, but very close, and it was only a very strategic and effective crisis communication effort on the part of Edwards that helped stave off a media tsunami.
Still as Pew reports , despite Edwards best attempts to downplay attention, his affair for the second straight week remained the #4 most covered news story filling 4% of the newshole and trailing only the Olympics at 14% of total coverage, the general election at 22%, and the invasion of Georgia at 26% of…
nisbetmc | August 19, 2008One image of Gore: A partisan activist and leader.
CNN reports this afternoon that Al Gore will have a major speaking slot at the Democratic convention, joining Obama on stage the last night of the convention in front of a stadium crowd of 70,000.
I am a big fan of Al Gore and often think about how history and this country would be different if Gore had run a more competent presidential campaign in 2000. Yet I can't also help but observe the strong partisan message that Gore continues to indirectly send on climate change.
Various poll analyses reveal that despite Al Gore's Nobel prize winning…
nisbetmc | August 19, 2008
From The Scientist's Newsblog:
In an industry known for backing Republicans, Sen. Barack Obama has emerged as a surprising pharma favorite in the US presidential election.
In April, Obama won a mock election at the annual DTC national meeting, a drug advertising conference, with a 53% to 46% victory over Sen. John McCain. Drug companies have also put the money where their mouth is: Pharma has donated three times more to the Obama campaign than to McCain's.
According to a Bloomberg News report citing data from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), pharma execs and employees have donated $…
nisbetmc | August 19, 2008Will Joe Biden get the VP nod from Obama?
Obama is expected to announce his VP choice in the next 24 to 36 hours and the selection won't be unveiled by way of the usual media leak followed by a press conference. Instead, in a sign of Obama's new model of campaigning, the digitally networked candidate plans to first announce the selection by way of early morning e-mails and text messages to his millions of online supporters and then to take advantage of a full day's news cycle of coverage.
This type of "special access" granted to his digital network is a novel and easy way to reinforce the…
nisbetmc | August 18, 2008
Roughly 60% of Independents say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported easing restrictions on off-shore drilling, according to a recent Gallup survey (figure above). But the survey also shows that there's an even stronger positive response when Americans are asked about voting for a candidate who favors establishing tax incentives to reward energy conservation; who favors raising fuel mileage standards; or who favors authorizing a $150 billion dollar investment in the development of renewable energy technology.
Yet off-shore drilling remains a winning message for…
nisbetmc | August 13, 2008The reality of high gas prices and the successful advertising blitz of the McCain team has helped redefine the nature and relevance of the economy in voters' minds and in media discussion.
In making sense of the complexity of the economy, public focus has been shifted from housing, health care, and jobs to a singular fixation on energy, specifically gas prices. Given McCain's position on drilling, it's an interpretative shift that heavily favors his candidacy. Here's how The Politico described the GOP strategy with a noteworthy quote from the pollster Peter Brown:
"I think they have a real…
nisbetmc | August 12, 2008Shanto Iyengar is a professor of communication at Stanford University and director of Stanford's Political Communication Lab. He's one of the senior scholars in the field of political communication and is a leading researcher in the areas of framing and political advertising respectively.
He joined the Washington Post today for an online conversation with readers about the McCain and Obama advertising strategies. In his answers you will find many of the same themes and conclusions raised at this blog, principles that as I have detailed before, not only apply to understanding the communication…
nisbetmc | August 12, 2008
I watched Edwards' interview Friday night and it was pretty clear that he had help from crisis communication experts, delivering a narrative about a man who had come from a modest background only to succumb to hubris in his quest for power. With his southern charm and his trial lawyer poise, I thought it was a brilliant performance, though questions obviously linger about payments to his mistress and whether or not he really is the father of the child.
Of course, going head to head with the Olympics, only 3 million people actually watched the interview, but that was part of the strategy.…