12:02 pm
Why McCain’s Attacks Won’t Work
I probably should not speak with such certitude, but Nate Silver over at 538 had a post this weekend that makes a pretty compelling case that going negative makes it nearly impossible for McCain-Palin to win:
[T]he fact that McCain is resorting to these sorts of attacks are an indication of just how much his brand has been damaged. They certainly aren’t likely to help him to repair it.
The reason, as Silver notes, is that negative attacks usually work only when the candidate making the attack has a reservoir of positive feeling — or, to put it in statistical terms, a strong net favorability rating. For those, like me, who are not statistics geeks, what this means is that a significantly larger number of people think positively of you than who think negatively of you.
In that context, take a look at the graph that Silver put together:
As the graph above shows, McCain’s previous efforts to damage Obama — the so-called “celebrity” campaign of late July and early August and the sex-ed/lipstick campaigns of Septemver — did cause Obama’s favorability rating to decline — but it also led to a similar, albeit less steep drop in McCain’s as well. That demonstrates pretty clearly the risks involved in McCain’s current approach.
Over the past week, Obama’s net favorability rating has surged while McCain’s has crashed and burned. To make matters worse, the drop in McCain’s numbers is a product not of negative advertising by the Obama campaign, but rather McCain’s own actions:
- growing concern over his choice of Palin;
- the media calling him out on the stream of lies that immediately predated the financial crisis;
- his initial ham-handed (”the fundamentals of the economy are strong”) response to the crisis;
- his disastrous decision to “suspend” his campaign;
- his failure to play a significant role in the subsequent bailout negotiations — and perhaps contributing to the problems that led to the failed first vote; and
- his taking credit for the bailout on the day of the failed vote.
All of this has created a dilemma for McCain. Silver:
[W]ith the exception of the past couple of weeks, McCain’s and Obama’s ratings have been fairly strongly correlated, tending to rise and fall together. This is not to say that negative campaigning doesn’t work — it sometimes does — but it works at diminished efficiency, because you may be giving back 50 cents on the dollar by harming your own approval scores.
Negative campaigns work best when the candidate making the attack is leading in net favorability, or at the very least has a significant balance of positive favorability from which he can “withdraw.” In addition, the most successful negative campaigns in recent years have come from the candidate already ahead in the polls.
So McCain faces a number of significant disadvantages here: his net favorability rating is already cratering (as is, for that matter, Sarah Palin’s); he is behind; and people don’t want to hear about character, they want to hear who has the better economic plan. Or to put it another way, McCain can throw turds at Obama, but it won’t help him if the electorate continues to regard him as the (angry and bitter) pig, lipstick or no.
I encourage you to read Silver’s entire piece.
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