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Friday, August 22, 2008

Raising Expectations

The McCain team put out a memo today saying they expect Obama to get as much as a fifteen point bump coming out of the Democrat Convention comparable to Clinton's in '92 but I wouldn't read too much into it. It's a smart campaign move to raise the expectations so if the opponent does not meet them they have a talking point.
I don't see a bounce that big in this day and age and Obama has tended to bounce more like a flat basketball than a surging political athlete. The difference in this year from the "92 elections is the coverage, in "92 it was still ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN if you had cable, conservative talk radio was still in its infancy, there was no internet so your news came from print and the big three still. I remember the '92 race well because it was the first time I followed it and voted, Perot fwiw.
The bias was not so evident back then because there was nothing to compare it to. Now I see back though it as I remember all the awful press Reagan got.
Today the information age has changed everything and the old models don't work anymore because the MSM no longer controls the flow of that information, the internet has changed everything. Fact checking is now instant, campaign statements take minutes to get out not days and internet video that didn't exist in '04, not to mention the blogosphere that has grown exponentially since then. This is truely the first information age election season.

1 comment:

shoprat said...

I would be astonished if he got more than 2 or 3 points and would be unsurprised to see no meaningful bounce.