Two Princes – The Spin Doctors
Theory: most debates don’t matter very much to the outcome of elections primarily because both sides have a strong incentive to argue that they won. The media therefore reports the competing claims, and even if it supplements that with some element of ‘objective’ external judgment, that element will be submerged under the general morass of competing stories.
In essence, the actual debate itself doesn’t matter a whole lot. Which makes sense, really. Anyone who is willing to flip their vote (or commit their vote) based on a 90-minute debate is pretty likely to switch it again thanks to some other event later.
The thing that can really swing some votes is a drawn-out narrative. If you keep hearing for a week that one candidate is in trouble, then that trouble will stick. This is essentially what happened with the first debate. Although the narrative that the debate single-handedly rescued Romney is overstated, it really does seem to have had a significant effect. There is pretty good evidence that a big swing happened in the immediate 24 hour aftermath (supplemented by a ‘normal’ correction that likely would have happened anyway), but that swing could have been a bounce rather than a more permanent shift if not for the coverage in the days that followed.
We’ll get another data point on this question over the next couple days. Debate #3 was, to put it bluntly, a crush. Romney looked out of sorts, basically conceded that he would just do the same foreign policy as Obama except with more bluster and less success, and got stung by the president on numerous occasions who was well-prepared this time to stick him to his past statements.
But unlike debate #1, where Obama’s mediocre performance provoked a firestorm of Democratic panic and self-flagellation, the Republican side has stuck to their guns. It’s pretty impressive that the unity has held, really. Romney played the same ‘I’m not really a conservative’ game, but did so far less successfully. You’d think that a fair portion of the far Right would be going nuts right now about Romney selling out conservative principles – and using that fact to explain why he lost the debate.
But no, they’re just chugging along claiming that it was Romney’s plan all along to lose the debate.
And that’s how you get reports on the debate like this, from Slate’s John Dickerson. He notes most of Romney’s weaknesses and implies strongly that Obama won the debate. His opening line, in fact, is “Mitt Romney brought a knife to a gunfight. A butter knife.” And yet he accepts the premise that this was a reasonable strategy of just trying to maintain the status quo.
But this is precisely what Obama tried to do in the first debate, for which he was raked over the coals. For some reason in this narrative, Romney looking like a deer in the headlights is reasonable strategy, while Obama’s use of the same ‘strategy’ was catastrophic.
What else? Well, according to Dickerson, “the immediate exit polls were mixed.” But they weren’t mixed. They range from clear Obama victory to absolute Obama crush. He asks rhetorically: “Partisans love this stuff, but do undecided voters? Do the voters who were with Obama in 2008, but think he’s tarnished his brand?” Well, once again we can look at the polls which indicate that yes, the voters DO like this stuff. It’s not perfect evidence, of course, because these polls have small sample sizes and can only capture a snapshot. But it’s better than no evidence.
This is precisely the sort of report that can only be written if the losing candidate (and all supporters) spin madly. It does conclude that Obama won the debate, basically, but does so in a way that will be hard to notice if you aren’t already looking for it.
It’s not a uniquely bad piece of journalism. It’s just a demonstration that journalism about debates is fundamentally pretty stupid. Journalists desperately want to avoid making editorial judgments about who ‘really’ won the debate. Which means they report about the spin and/or they try to imagine who ‘swing voters’ will think won the debate. Which just amounts to editorializing in a different (more hidden) way.
For more on this see Kevin Drum on the hack gap.