A few days before the first Bush-Kerry debate, I suggested the Bush campaign’s spin machine may have been a little too good. BC04 had spent about $150 million before the Miami debate to convince voters that Kerry was unimpressive and uninspiring. The image the Bush gang had created was that of a dull, rigid man, who lacked core beliefs, and constantly contradicted himself.
As a consequence, as the debates approached, voters expected to tune in and see a vacillating and inarticulate weakling. That obviously didn’t happen; Kerry used the debates as effectively as anyone in recent memory to turn the entire campaign around.
And now even the Republicans are acknowledging it. As Ryan Lizza noted, Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio has polled 12 battleground states and discovered that the “cartoonish” image of the Democrat before the debates made it easier for Kerry to excel.
By nearly a two to one margin, voters who did not watch any of the debates agreed with the statement that “John Kerry is a flip-flopper.” In contrast, among voters who watched all three debates, voters were statistically split on whether they agreed with the statement, indicating Kerry’s debate performance helped him to counter the millions of dollars spent in these states by the Bush campaign on the “flip-flopper” theme.
“Leading up to the first debate, the Bush campaign very effectively defined John Kerry as a wishy-washy flip-flopper who never knew where he stood, and that’s what voters expected to see when they tuned in. Apparently they got something different from what they were expecting, otherwise Kerry wouldn’t have benefited from the debates.” concluded Fabrizio.
In dealing with the media, BC04 tried to build up Kerry as the ultimate debating machine. One even argued, without a hint of humor, that Kerry is literally “better than Cicero” at political debates. Voters, however, never got that message and they ended up liking what they saw. The Bush campaign, in other words, was a victim of its own spin machine.
Moreover, the same Fabrizio analysis suggests that if Kerry wins next week, he’ll largely have the debates to thank for it.
This data ends the debate about the debates — these voters tuned in and Kerry turned it on. It’s clear that these debates gave Kerry’s campaign a much needed boost and helped erase some of the image the Bush campaign painted Kerry as. In fact, the more of the debates the battleground voters watched, the more they moved into John Kerry’s column. Voters who watched all three debates are voting Kerry by 6 points versus voters who watched no debates favoring the President by 21 points. There’s no question — advantage Kerry.
Just as an aside, it’s not terribly surprising that people who avoided the debates are backing Bush by a wide margin. It reinforces what all the data already shows — the less informed you are, the more likely you’re backing Bush. It’s a shame, but it’s true.