With the Vice-Presidential debate less than twelve hours away, it’s clear that Sarah Palin has her work cut out for her if she’s going to reverse the trend of public sentiment regarding her candidacy:
With the vice presidential candidates set to square off today in their only scheduled debate, public assessments of Sarah Palin’s readiness have plummeted, and she may now be a drag on the Republican ticket among key voter groups, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
(…)
A month ago, voters rated Palin as highly as they did McCain or his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, but after weeks of intensive coverage and several perceived missteps, the shine has diminished.
Nearly a third of adults in a new poll from the Pew Research Center said they paid a lot of attention to Palin’s interviews with CBS News’s Katie Couric, a series that prompted grumbling among some conservative commentators about Palin’s competency to be the GOP’s vice presidential standard-bearer. The Pew poll showed views of Palin slipping over the past few days alone.
In the new Post-ABC poll, Palin matches the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., on empathy, one of McCain’s clear deficits against Obama, while fewer than half of voters think she understands “complex issues.”
But it is the experience question that may prove her highest hurdle, particularly when paired with widespread public concern about McCain’s age. About half of all voters said they were uncomfortable with the idea of McCain taking office at age 72, and 85 percent of those voters said Palin does not have the requisite experience to be president.
The 60 percent who now see Palin as insufficiently experienced to step into the presidency is steeply higher than in a Post-ABC poll after her nomination early last month. Democrats and Republicans alike are now more apt to doubt her qualifications, but the biggest shift has come among independents.
In early September, independents offered a divided verdict on Palin’s experience; now they take the negative view by about 2 to 1. Nearly two-thirds of both independent men and women in the new poll said Palin has insufficient experience to run the White House.
Most importantly, she has significant weaknesses among key voting blocs:
[A] third of independent voters now indicate they are less likely to support McCain because of Palin, compared with 20 percent who said so in an ABC poll a month ago. Palin now repels more independents than she attracts to McCain. The share of independent women less apt to support McCain because of the Palin pick has more than doubled to 34 percent, while the percentage more inclined to support him is down eight points.
White Catholics, another important group of swing voters, also are now more likely to say that Palin dampens their support for McCain.
So, to a large degree, it all comes down to tonight’s debate. Because the expectations for her are so low at this point, Palin merely needs to come across and competent and prepared and at least somewhat knowledgeable on the issues and the post-debate spin is likely to be in her favor. If that happens, I would suspect that a lot of the anti-Palin coverage we’ve been seeing for the last several weeks — all of which really started with the Charles Gibson interviews (here and here) and the Couric interviews (here, here, here, and here) — will quiet down. While I don’t expect Palin will be able to turn things around to the point where they were before people actually knew much about her, a good performance tonight would at least stop the bleeding and that alone would help the McCain campaign.
But, like James Joyner, I doubt that such a performance would have much of an impact on the Presidential race:
Unless she completely falls apart, then, we’re much more likely to see a repeat of last Friday’s first presidential debate: A rather bland affair where neither embarrasses themselves nor says anything particularly memorable.
Unlike that debate, though, a “tie” goes to Palin because Biden is expected to blow her doors off. Like that debate, though, unless the Republican wins big, the Democrat wins the night by protecting the lead and running out the clock.
If, on the other hand, Palin comes across poorly tonight then she is likely to continue to be a drag on McCain, especially among the independents in battleground states that he would need to if he’s going to have any chance of winning this election.
