Last week, we noted that despite spending millions on television advertising, President Obama’s campaign simply was not convincing voters he deserved to be reelected. This week, Democratic pollsters James Carville and Stan Greenburg released a memo summarizing their focus group research explaining why:
It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance – and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction. They are wrong, and that will fail. … These voters are not convinced that we are headed in the right direction.
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The spots that simply talk about progress on the economy did not do well. The first offered a graphic depiction of job decline during the early months of the recession and job growth under President Obama. The second highlighted progress on jobs in the automobile industry. These ads did not win over most Obama voters.
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The spots that simply talk about progress on the economy did not do well. The first offered a graphic depiction of job decline during the early months of the recession and job growth under President Obama. The second highlighted progress on jobs in the automobile industry. These ads did not win over most Obama voters.
The memo goes on to quote one Columbus, Ohio woman, “All the positives they show for him, that hasn’t happened. All the jobs returned and all, it’s not there. But they’re showing it like boy, this is happened. It was way down here and we’ve done all this. It’s all exaggerated figures.”
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