Strategists Answered Your Questions and Look Ahead to November

DAVID WINSTON: Look, I think Ayers probably has some significance here, but in the contrast of what people are focused on, people are worried about how their health care's going, how the economy's going, what their retirement looks like, whether their job's going to be there and the Bill Ayers dynamic doesn't answer any of those questions, and that's why, again, in this last debate, I was glad to see that McCain finally sort of focused on the economy in terms of addressing those. He still brought up Ayers, which I thought, really in the context of what people are looking, is not what people - it's not their focus. They want to know what is it that you're going to do to fix this economic situation, and so, going to Anna's point, in terms of the robo-calls, when you've got content that is not going to drive voters, then what's the point of it?

RAY SUAREZ: Sarah asks from Ohio I think a question that a lot of Americans ask about this time of year. "Do television ads really do anything? Do they actually sway voters? I just hit the mute button." Anna?

ANNA GREENBERG: Yes, they do. And I think that you wouldn't see as many ads as you see in these battleground states if they didn't. They are starting earlier and earlier, and they have increasing intensity, so I think by the end of the campaign - you know talking about the last month of the campaign or a few weeks out, I think they probably do become less effective, not only because there have been so many ads for so long, but also so many ads from so many different individual candidates and individual groups that you can't really make sense of it all.

But we know they have an impact because we track various aspects of, say, a candidate's image, and we track it against the advertising that has been on the air; we can see a direct relationship between them.

So, for instance, if somebody - you know, this is just using a hypothetical example - is attacking Obama on whether or not he could be a good commander-in-chief, and then you see in the tracking survey that his numbers on is he a good commander-in-chief go down, then you can make that link between the advertising and an impact on how you see the candidates, and we see that all the time with the work we do, you know, at every level.

RAY SUAREZ: David?

DAVID WINSTON: I've got a slightly different take on that, and I think the presidential level tends to be somewhat different as well and that is - the advertising plays a role as it plays into the overall discourse of the debate, and as it becomes news and as it becomes discussed as a news story, there are a lot of ads out there that are put up by the various campaigns that just simply have no impact and nobody hears about.

It's really how it plays into the overall discourse of the campaign, and you can have an ad that goes up just a few times and it'll become the central point of the discussion because of the way it interjected itself on the campaign.

So my sense is I think advertising, particularly at the presidential level, has much more of a role as an earned media item, and earned media, for the folks out there, that's sort of the press covering it, it becoming a news story, more so than just the paid side of it in the sense of traditional advertisement like press.

ANNA GREENBERG: Well, I think things are changing and I don't know that any of us really know what the next two or three election cycles are going to look like. And they're changing in a couple ways. First, we have a fragmentation of media and fewer people watching the traditional broadcast channels, and so you've got an increasing number of people watching cable, and a lot of the media buyers and media firms not quite knowing how to put together their media buys with the cable environment. That's the first thing. And then you throw satellite television into it and then it's even more complicated.

The second thing is that I've noticed - I noticed it in 2006 and this year as well, that negative advertising seems to be a little less effective in that it seems to backfire for some of the candidates who use them.

So, look at the Mark Udall-Bob Schaeffer race in Colorado, where there has been an unbelievable amount of negative advertising against Mark Udall and he still leads in that race. And if you look at races of 2006, for instance, the races I worked on, Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota for Senate and Gabby Giffords for Congress in Arizona - in both those cases, the negative advertising actually ended up hurting the candidates who ran them, and I think we're seeing a similar dynamic here with McCain.

I don't know if this is sort of a permanent trend - certainly, using negative ads is part of kind of every campaign's toolbox, but it seems like something is going on.

DAVID WINSTON: Anna, I wouldn't disagree, in the sense of I think what you're seeing happening with negative ads is it's tending to reflect more about the person, in other - if I'm saying something about my opponent it says really more about me than it does about my opponent, in terms of an individual campaign. And I think - the other element is, it's still not answering the basic question; that's really terrific if the other person is horrible, but what are you going to do?

RAY SUAREZ: I want to read you the next two letters together, even though in a way they're diametrically opposed to each other, and have you talk about the difficulties of crafting a campaign strategy for any candidate, but in this particular case, John McCain.

Chang writes from Westminster, Colorado, "John McCain has been in the war and experienced what it was like. He lost blood for our country, slept in the cold and faced the enemies and was tortured. He did all of this for us, so we can have a future. We owe him for defending our country." And Sandra writes from Casselberry, Florida, "I'm concerned that Obama has allowed seniors to think that McCain actually has a plan, and worse, that he cares about them. His gray hair equals wisdom to some. To those with politically sophisticated grandchildren, the gray hair equals manipulation and has helped grandparents to see more clearly."

Now, here are two Americans who have taken away diametrically opposed things from the same person before that person even opens his mouth to begin the persuasion. How do you shape a message to who a candidate is and who a candidate has been?

ANNA GREENBERG: That's a very difficult question to answer, because, speaking from the perspective of someone who works as a campaign strategist and tries to help candidates, in essence, introduce themselves to voters, you know, convey a narrative about who they are, what their values are, what they stand for and who they are going to help, who they are for, whose side are they on - it's, you have candidates like John McCain who come into this presidential election with a very strong brand.

You know, people didn't know a lot about him, quite honestly, except that he was a war hero and a former POW and that he was a maverick. And that, actually, has led to a really tough race for Obama. If you look, you know, prior to the Republican - well, prior to the Democratic convention, the lead that Obama had was actually not very big.

And people said well, with this partisan environment, you know, obviously Obama's weak, because he should have a bigger lead than he has. Well, I think a big part of that was the strength of the McCain brand, and, you know, McCain really didn't need to, in some ways, introduce himself or reintroduce himself to voters.

I think he undermined his own brand, quite frankly, in the last month-and-a-half, starting with his selection of Palin. We could talk about that at more length, but I think - and then we've seen in the polling that when we measure certain attributes of John McCain, like being a strong leader, those numbers have actually declined the last month-and-a-half.

Obama, you know, has a different sort of challenge, in that he came in without people knowing a lot about him. And they make certain assumptions because of his party, because of the color of his skin, that they project upon him, and so he has had a really, I think, hard task in a lot of ways. To, even though he has - there's a big resource disparity, to sort of tell a story about who he is. And you'll notice that the very first set of advertisements in the general election for the Obama campaign were all biographical ads.

And even then it was still very difficult to sort of convey really who he was, what he's about, where he came from, and it's really only been since the Democratic convention, and really since the debates, I think, that people have gotten a much fuller since of who Obama is - even with the unbelievable resource disparity. So I'm not really answering the question because I think it's a really hard one to answer because each candidate comes in with their own challenges around introducing themselves to voters.

And Dorothy writes from Merced, California, "I find it to be somewhat scary that McCain supporters are calling for him to be tougher on Obama. How do you stop a groundswell of people who begin to yell 'terrorist' and other more frightening things? I am 63 and have lived through the '60s and have seen what happens when these things get out of control. I do not want to see my country go down that path again." When you're behind, the consensus seems to be that you've got to do something, but in the particular case of the McCain campaign, what is the something has been the challenge. And here we have someone saying, yeah, I want to see this guy get tougher, and another person saying, boy, just that very idea scares me. David?

DAVID WINSTON: I think part of what's going on here - and this is where I think the McCain campaign has been struggling a bit, and that is understanding what is the strategic problem facing the McCain campaign?

And there are a group within the campaign that feel that, well, what we need to do is sort of fire up the base. The problem is, either party's base is nowhere near large enough to be able to outright win an election. What happened to Republicans in 2006 is the majority coalition that Reagan and Newt had put together fell apart. We lost amongst Independents by 18 points, married women and children, middle-income Catholics, a series of folks, and that coalition fell apart.

The challenge to Republicans, if they're going to rebuild a majority, is to rebuild that majority coalition. That's a different discourse than sort of taking off the gloves, it's this concept of how do you rebuild that coalition. And that's what the focus - that's why focusing on the economy - making or breaking Bush - all fed into being able to rebuild that.

And so I think what you're hearing there is a discourse of base versus base, when the real problem for both campaigns is, how do they build sustainable majority coalitions?

ANNA GREENBERG: I think that McCain has a real challenge because the overall environment is so terrible for Republicans, and he carries this baggage around - you know, voting 90 percent of the time with Bush, et cetera - so there is a perception that electing him would be a continuation of the policies of the past, and I think that has been a very tough problem for him; it would be a tough problem for any Republican, frankly.

That being said, I think the McCain campaign made a strategic mistake in not addressing the economy early on in a kind of comprehensive, sympathetic way. He sort of had a populist tone for a while - kind of anti-CEO, anti-Wall Street sort of posture - but there was never anything comprehensive. And then you have the, I think, the enormous misstep of talking about the fundamentals of the economy being strong just four or five days before, you know, the Treasury Secretary said we need to bail out Wall Street.

So I think has been a big mistake, and in the absence of doing that, going negative on Obama, as I said before, has really actually sort of come back to hurt him and undermines aspects of his brand and his image that people like about him. And I think he really made a strategic mistake even in the context of what is a very tough environment for a Republican to run in.

RAY SUAREZ: We live in a country of, what 306-308 million people who plod along a broad continuum, ideologically and financially, and Vicki writes from St. Louis Park, Minnesota, "Why isn't either party talking about poverty - just the rich and middle class?" And that question brought to mind how difficult it is in American politics - period - to talk about issues of rich and poor and the divisions between rich and poor and the way the wealth is distributed in this country. It's been a long time since we've heard a really interesting critique of the American distribution of the goods of society.

ANNA GREENBERG: Well, John Edwards tried to give that critique - so - you know, I think it has to do with a couple of things. First, of course, a lot of it has to do with how we finance our campaigns and how different interests are represented in Washington through the financing of campaigns, and we know that special interests - moneyed interests, corporate interests - have disproportionate influence in Washington because of campaign contributions. And I think that's, you know, a big piece of what's going on.

But the other piece is pure, sort of - a pure political calculation about whose votes matter. And the kind of broadly defined middle class - and a lot of the people in this country think of themselves as middle class, even if, based on purely income, I think that they're not middle class - tends to be more of a swing vote.

If you look at people who are lower-income and poor, to the extent that they vote - and they tend to vote less than others - they tend to vote pretty Democratic, so when you're thinking about trying to win elections, the middle class is sort of the core group that you need - or at least the perception that you're an advocate for the middle class - in order to win elections, especially in troubled economic times, like we're in now.

RAY SUAREZ: David?

DAVID WINSTON: I guess, in terms of looking at the electorate, first-off, they tend to be a center-right group - and the way I come to that conclusion: the last exit poll, those people voted 32 percent identified themselves as conservative, 20 percent as liberal, and then the remaining 48 percent moderate, so it's center, then right. And to some degree, the campaigns, as Anna described, are going to address the concerns in such a way to build that majority coalition. Ultimately, to govern, you need a coalition to be able to drive that element.

The one other element I do have to say - this is an interesting election in that it's the first time that the Republicans have clearly been overwhelmingly outspent. I mean, there'll be some - although I don't know how I feel about this at this point - who will be able to say that Obama simply bought this election, because he was able to outspend at margins of five-to-one and six-to-one by not taking campaign - by not keeping his pledge to campaign finance reform in terms of sticking to the amount of public funding that we're giving to both presidential candidates that he said no to it.

That dynamic, in terms of how we sort of proceed after this is going to be an interesting one, given the fact that now, you see the Democrats having this huge advantage in terms of being able to get external money.

DAVID WINSTON: The reason groups have more money than the other is, when you're sitting in majorities, majorities just raise enormous amounts of money. So, going back to the '80s, it was the Democrats, when they were holding out the Senate, did well, and at a presidential level, Republicans did well. Certainly, the inverse was true when you look at '96, where Clinton did so much better than Bob Dole, again, Clinton being the incumbent.

ANNA GREENBERG: But, David, let's be fair. This is not the real reason there's a different - or at least the main reason. If you look at Obama's contributions, they are by majority small donors. There's a massive number of contributors.

So this is movement politics; this is people from the ground up. You saw that with the Kerry campaign as well. You know, it's being driven by a desire for change - I know that sounds like a cliche, but it's very hard to look at the massive number of donors and the amount that they're giving - not very much - and conclude anything but. This is a desire, from the ground up, to have change. It's not just about Democrats having the majority in Congress for a year-and-a-half.

DAVID WINSTON: But I would also tell you that Obama has triple the amount of large donors that George W. Bush had in terms of the last campaign - triple the amount of large donors.

RAY SUAREZ: We got some questions about running mates. James writes from New York: "Honestly, I don't see how Sarah Palin has helped McCain, and for that matter, I don't see how Biden has helped Obama. In the last couple of weeks, are their campaigns going to be unleashing these two?"

ANNA GREENBERG: You know, I think that's a really interesting question, and I think that what's going on with the two candidates are different. Initially, when Sarah Palin - when the announcement was made that she was going to be the nominee - it actually was very helpful for the McCain campaign; it produced an incredible outpouring of enthusiasm and energy for the ticket; she continues to be a great fundraiser for him; she continues to be a great draw at rallies around the country.

But if you look at what's happened over time - and it's not just any one piece of it - but if you look at the combination of the number of stories about her speeches, and the advertising, and the "Bridge to Nowhere" line, and if you look at the interviews with Gibson and Katie Couric, and then also the vice presidential debate - if you come through all of those - and then of course the Troopergate and the abuse-of-power ruling, she has become a drag on the McCain ticket. And in fact, when you do sort of sophisticated modeling of vote choice, how people feel about Palin, controlling for everything else, actually predicts how people vote, which is shocking, because vice presidential candidates usually have had no impact on how people vote.

I think Biden actually is taking on the much more traditional role of the vice presidential candidate in our politics, which is he rises above the excitement at the outset and then he sort of does his work, going through the country, you know, campaigning, but ultimately, he doesn't have much of an impact on the ticket. So it's a very interesting dynamic.

RAY SUAREZ: David, how does a Republican look at the choice of Governor Palin?

DAVID WINSTON: The campaign had a clear choice in terms of how to use her. And I think it's been reflective of their overall strategy. Here, you had this woman who, one - if you wanted to identify her with something, you could have identified her with the issue of energy given Alaska and the enormous impact it has on the rest of the country in terms of that particular issue - and also, you could have identified her with some specific key groups: married women with children, middle-income independents.

Instead, they chose to take her and have her rev up the base. And so, my sense is, they've sort of miscast her, and in that role where she could have, I think, done quite a bit to sort of help rebuild that majority coalition. As a result, she's been turned into this characterization of herself in not-positive terms, and I think - I agree with Anna - initially, I think, she was quite helpful, and now, she does not have at all the standing that she had during the convention - the Republican convention.

ANNA GREENBERG: She's the least popular of the four major candidates.

RAY SUAREZ: Was there consternation inside the ranks of party pros and gray heads and the kind of people who get together at the convention and talk about these things? Were there other choices for John McCain that might have been safer, and, over the long term, more productive?

DAVID WINSTON: I think there were a variety of - again, there were other choices beside Biden as well - I mean, you could go and say, well, would Hillary Clinton have been better than Joe Biden - I mean, I think that's true for anybody in terms of who they pick.

But the key thing is, how do you emphasize them in terms of why you chose them and what is the reason they are on the ticket. I think, to some degree, the Obama campaign had a clear understanding in terms of what they were going to do with Biden, in the sense of their candidate - Obama doesn't have his foreign affairs experience, so you pick the head of the foreign affairs committee to sort of supplement that.

In the case of, like I said, in the case of Sarah Palin, you know, you had some obvious things - she could bring in some swing groups and certainly the issue of energy and then you - but you decided to go in a completely different direction. It would have been like taking Joe Biden and saying, let's focus on the youth vote. He might be able to, but the point is his foreign affairs. And so I think, to some degree, there was sort of some miscast going on here.

RAY SUAREZ: Jim writes from Beaverton, Oregon, "How do you see the effect of third-party candidates on either side on the ballot impacting the presidential election?" There are a couple of active candidacies out there - Cynthia McKinney, running under the banner of the Green Party, Ralph Nader running for a third time, Chet Baldwin, Bob Barr running for the Libertarians - are there states where this could change the margin?

ANNA GREENBERG: I think the third-party candidate issue is a potential problem for McCain, particularly when you look at less-partisan voters - independents, you know, weak partisans - because it gives sort of a place for people who are ready for a change, really aren't convinced that McCain can produce that change, but for whatever reason cannot get comfortable with Obama, it gives them a place to go - particularly if they conclude that McCain is going to lose, it gives them a place to go.

And in the research that we've done, it's pretty clear that the people who are - which could probably reach a combined level of five or six percent, if you look at where they're on the ballot - it looks like it's going to have an impact on the McCain vote.

RAY SUAREZ: David, are there certain states where it might matter more than others?

DAVID WINSTON: Anytime it gets really, really close in terms of a state, then all of a sudden, those votes matter. Generally - again, 2000 being the oddity and Nader being, obviously, the problem for Gore in that particular case - but my sense is, you know, they'll play a minimal role. I'm not sure that these states are going to be that close in terms of the margin that it'll create a difference.

And you have to go back to somebody like a Perot, who had this huge amount of resources to be able to put into a race, and also had a particular political situation that gave reason for an entry into the political dynamic here.

These candidates - there's no, at least at this point, there's no driving element as to why people would go to one of these folks as opposed to either Obama or McCain. I mean, in this particular sense, I think that the general electorate sees a choice, and it's not that this choice is bad, but there's clearly some differences between them, and I think they're comfortable with the candidates.

ANNA GREENBERG: I just have to push back on you, here, David, because we have a lot of states that were Bush states that are very close, or you know, a slight lead for McCain, and in that sort of situation, even getting five percent of the vote, you know combined - these candidates combined - could swing a state to Obama. I really do think that it's a potential problem in some of these very close states.

DAVID WINSTON: Very much, in terms of if you have a state that's dramatically close, they could play a role, but I think the strategic problem is much more broad-based and that ends up being pretty tactical within each state.

RAY SUAREZ: This brings us to the close of another edition of Insider Forum. Again, thanks to our guests, Anna Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, and David Winston, of the Winston Group. And thanks to all our viewers and online visitors who sent in questions. We hope we've answered some of your most pressing questions as we head into the final stretch of this presidential race. Until next time, thanks for joining us. I'm Ray Suarez.