For the past year, conservative and Republican groups have spent more than$138 million in a concerted attempt to turn voters against Barack Obama.
The big dog in the effort to drive up Obama’s negative job approval ratings, the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, has invested $82.5 million in independent expenditures, mostly for television ads. Restore Our Future hired Larry McCarthy, the media consultant who achieved both recognition and infamy for producing the Willie Horton commercial in 1988. Restore Our Future’s hope: to do to Obama what McCarthy did to Michael Dukakis.
So far in the campaign, the right has outspent the left on independent advertising by just over 3 to 1.
Obama’s conservative adversaries have had plenty to work with. Median household income has steadily declined, and, until October’s employment report was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, unemployment had remained above 8 percent for the first 44 months of Obama’s presidency. Since Obama’s November 2008 victory, in fact, the labor force participation rate — the percentage of adults actually working — has fallen from 65.8 percent to 63.6 percent, a 2.2 point drop. In other words, a growing number of men and women have dropped out of the workforce altogether.
Despite this abundance of liabilities, Obama’s job approval rating over the past year has gone up, not down. By most measures, the massive anti-Obama television, radio and Internet campaign has been a bust.
Romney’s rising poll numbers in the aftermath of the debate on Oct. 3 actually reveal the relative failure of Romney’s general election advertising. Millions of dollars in ads couldn’t do what one effective debate performance — and a dismal showing by the president — did. By Oct. 6, Romney trailed Obama nationally by only 1.4 points, 47 to 48.4.
No one knows how the interaction of the two remaining presidential debates and the final four weeks of advertising and campaigning will play out, but extensive data suggest that the anti-Obama independent expenditure campaign has faltered in its effort to fatally discredit the president. As of Oct. 6, RealClearPolitics was still projecting a 303-235 Electoral College victory for Obama, although some of the polling data R.C.P. has to work with was collected before the debate and does not fully reflect the dramatic changes afterward.
The survey data on Obama’s job favorability tell an interesting story. A full year ago, the final three NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys of 2011 – conducted in August, October and November – found that more voters held unfavorable views of Obama’s job performance, 51 percent, than positive views, 44 percent, a net 7 point negative rating.
The most recent NBC/WSJ poll, released the day before the debate, was conducted by Republican Bill McInturff and Democrat Peter Hart and found that this month, after the millions spent by such conservative groups as American Crossroads, Restore Our Future and Americans for Prosperity, Obama’s job approval ratings had actually improved to a net positive 49-48, an 8-point gain since the end of 2011.
The same pattern of improvement in Obama’s job approval ratings over the past year shows up in the New York Times/CBS polls, the Washington Post/ABC surveys and Gallup.
In an interview, Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for two Republican organizations, the super PAC American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, an affiliated 501(c)(4) issue advocacy organization (which together have spent over $32 million attacking Obama), contended that the Gallup tracking poll following Obama’s job approval ratings had shown a relatively consistent negative tilt until the conventions this summer.
Collegio noted that after Tampa and Charlotte, “there has been some pro-Obama movement. The question is whether an outside group could create or stop the momentum Obama has had since the convention. That’s a very good question.”
Carl Forti is involved in almost every aspect of the independent expenditure anti-Obama campaign as the founder of the Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, the political director of American Crossroads and a consultant to Crossroads GPS. He disputed the accuracy of NBC, Gallup and other national surveys.
“I’m seeing different numbers,” Forti said in a phone interview. After I sent him some of the national data, he replied in an email: “I think it’s fair to say that the numbers I’m seeing don’t match the national numbers.” Forti told me that he cannot “share internal poll data.”
In contrast, officials of Priorities USA — the pro-Obama super PAC that has spend $36.2 million attacking Romney — were more than willing to provide evidence of the effectiveness of their ads.
Before the debate, Brennan Bilberry, the research director for Priorities USA, sent me an internal memo from earlier in the summer that includes data from surveys by two Democratic polling firms — Garin-Hart-Yang Research and the Global Strategy Group — of 3,800 voters in Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. According to the memo, these surveys found that:
In all five of these swing states, more voters have an unfavorable view of Mitt Romney than a favorable one. On average, Romney’s favorable rating across these states is 36 percent favorable and 43 percent unfavorable.
Obama led Mitt Romney in these 5 swing states by 48-42. In addition, half the voters surveyed said that Obama was the best candidate to “stand up for the middle class,” compared to 31 percent who thought Romney was.
To determine how effective the Priorities USA ads have been, the pollsters compared media markets where the ads ran to markets where the ads did not run. In the “Priorities markets,” Obama had a 49-41 lead over Romney compared to a 46-43 lead in “non-Priorities markets.” Romney had a net 9 point negative rating, 35 favorable to 44 unfavorable, in the Priorities markets, compared to a negative five point rating in non-Priorities markets, 37-42. Obama had an 11 point advantage in the Priorities markets when voters were asked which candidate “is honest and someone you can trust,” compared to a 5 point advantage in the non-Priorities markets.
Bilberry also emailed the results of a number of public polls that he felt bolstered Priorities’ case.
A USA Today survey from July 8, for example, found that
Obama is the clear winner in the ad wars. Among swing-state voters who say the ads have changed their minds about a candidate, rather than just confirmed what they already thought, 76 percent now support the president, vs. 16 percent favoring Romney.
On July 17, ABC News reported that a Priorities USA Action ad, “Stage,” is the “ad Romney should fear the most.”
The commercial is narrated by Mike Earnest, who worked at a paper plant acquired by Bain Capital. He was told to build a 30-foot stage. A few days later, Bain officials used the stage to announce the closing of the plant. “Mitt Romney made over $100 million by shutting down our plant and devastated our lives. Turns out when we build that stage it was like building our own coffin, and it just makes me sick,” Earnest says at the end.
It is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of television advertising, especially political ads. Ace Metrix, Inc., a non-partisan television analytics firm, sells a technique it has developed to quantify the effectiveness of such ads.
Jonathan Symonds, executive vice president of Ace, described the firm’s method in an email to The Times. The company collects every political ad with national implications and sends them all out online to panels of viewers made up of 30 percent Republicans, 30 percent Democrats and 40 percent independents. The panelists rate the ads on persuasiveness and watchability on a broad scale designed to improve the results, a score from 1 to 950.
Presidential ads score well below ads for commercial products, 403 to 531. The highest scoring political ad to date was the Priorities USA Stage spot, which got a 562 rating.
Ace Metrix, at the request of The Times, provided average ratings for five groups, three of them conservative – Americans for Prosperity, American Crossroads and Restore Our Future – and two of them liberal – Priorities USA Action and Move On. The findings:
Americans for Prosperity, a 501(c)4 tax exempt advocacy group founded by David and Charles Koch, the owners of Koch Industries, held a decisive lead, followed by Priorities USA, American Crossroads and Moveon.org. Restore Our Future, the biggest spender, scored at the bottom.
After Romney’s success in the first presidential debate, the numbers may shift, but toward the end of last week the averaging of the personal favorability-unfavorability ratings of the two candidates put together by RealClearPolitics continued to give Obama a strong advantage, plus 5.4 points (51.6 to 46.2), compared to Romney’s negative 1.2 points (47-48.2).
It’s hard to determine the reasons for the slim payoff the pro-Romney forces have gotten in return for their huge investment. At the Denver debate, Romney made a concerted effort to present a more compassionate face and distance himself from earlier gaffes and it was much more effective than ads attacking the president.
One Republican active in the presidential campaign argued that negative campaigning can weaken an incumbent, but that the “the deal can only be closed” by a “quality challenger.” The source – who insisted on anonymity because he did not want to be quoted criticizing his party — pointed to the 2010 Senate races in Colorado and Nevada where an onslaught of ads undermined the stature of the Democratic incumbents, Michael Bennett and Harry Reid, respectively. In both cases, the Democrats still won “because the Republicans running against them were lousy candidates.”
According to a Republican media specialist who requested anonymity because he does not want to damage future client prospects, “Romney has a Little Lord Fauntleroy quality. He’s Richie Rich. People enjoy taking down the top dog.”
At this stage in the campaign, Priorities USA has successfully identified Romney’s point of vulnerability and made use of a relatively smaller bank account to stick the knife in. (At the time of the most recent filings, Priorities USA, the pro-Obama super PAC, had $4.8 million cash on hand as of Aug. 31; American Crossroads had $32 million; and Restore Our Future had $6.3 million.) The anti-Obama groups have tried multiple avenues of attack – welfare, deficits, slow growth, cutting Medicaid – but none have gained the kind of traction a challenger needs to bring an incumbent president to his knees.
With the benefit of momentum gained from the first debate, the Romney campaign and its conservative allies have four weeks left to capitalize on Obama’s vulnerabilities. Obama may have assisted his adversaries with the diffidence and lack of affect he displayed in Denver about the plight of American workers. No matter what happens, this probing of Obama’s weaknesses will continue.
The Oct. 5 Bureau of Labor report showing that unemployment had dropped below 8 percent to 7.8 percent is, of course, a huge break for Obama, although whether it came soon enough is impossible to say right now. Imagine, though, if after the dismal debate on Wednesday, the jobs report had been more of the same.
In terms of advertising, the jobs report undermines a central element of the theme being used against Obama. On Oct. 2, American Crossroads had announced an $11 million television buy of anti-Obama commercials beginning with one called “Actually Happened.” The now out-of-date spot declares, that “this is what the jobless rate actually is: 8.1 percent.”
Obama post-debate ads dispute Romney’s claims during the Denver debate, a clear sign that the president’s strategists believe they have to slow the challenger’s momentum right now. In “ How Can We Trust Romney?” the moderator asks
Why won’t Romney level with us about his tax plan which gives the wealthy huge new tax breaks? Because according to experts he’d have to raise taxes on the middle class or increase the deficit to pay for it. If we can’t trust him here how could we ever trust him here?
“Here” is accompanied by a photograph of the Oval Office.
A second Obama ad, “Mitt Romney Is Not Telling the Truth,” repeats the theme:
Mitt Romney didn’t tell the truth about his tax plan, his plan for Americans with pre-existing conditions, his Medicare plan, nor the president’s Medicare plan. Why would Romney not tell the truth about what he’d do as president? Because his real plans would hurt the middle class.
In large part, the contest over the next four weeks will be a struggle to stay on the offensive. We won’t know until Nov. 6 whether the debate marked a decisive turning point, but it has definitely put the president on the defensive and opened up some running room for Romney – a patch of daylight he and his allied super PACs and 501(c)4s have not seen for months.
Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.