http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/23/debates-deliver-favorability-edge-romney/
Debates deliver favorability edge to Romney; now above 50% in rating
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney answers a question during the third presidential ...more >
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BOCA RATON, Fla. — Mitt Romney crossed a major threshold early this week, moving above 50 percent in his favorability rating with voters, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls — and for the first time in the campaign he now leads President Obama on that measure.
The Republican presidential nominee has clearly benefited from the debates. He had a 44.5 percent favorability rating at the end of September, before the debates. But by Monday, when he and Mr. Obama faced off for the final debate of the campaign, Mr. Romney’s favorability average was up to 50.5 percent.
Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, said Mr. Romney’s favorability surge “really has been remarkable.”
“It was inevitable that Republicans were going to warm up to him once he became their nominee, but ever since his big victory in the first debate, his numbers with independents have improved a good deal as well,” he said. “We’re actually finding in our national tracking now that Romney’s favorability numbers are better than Obama‘s, which no one could have imagined six months ago.”
Mike McKenna, a Republican pollster, said Mr. Romney used the three 90-minute debates this month, with the largest national audiences he’s ever had, to humanize himself for voters who’d only seen snapshots in campaign commercials. news accounts and negative ads from theObama campaign.
Mr. McKenna said the Republican candidate’s performances punctured the Obama campaign’s effort to disqualify Mr. Romney in voters’ minds, through a bruising barrage of attack ads aimed at Hispanics, young adults and, chiefly, women voters.
“Six months of work and $400 million of ad buys went up in smoke in about 10 days,” Mr. McKenna said. “With less than 340 hours to go, they are having real trouble with their footing.”
With the presidential debates now behind him, Mr. Romney enters the final two-week stretch of the campaign having turned the election once again into a referendum on President Obama. His measured performance in Monday’s debate capped that off.
While pundits complained that he didn’t leave much daylight between himself and Mr. Obama on many issues, depriving them of the chance to compare and contrast policies, Republicans said Mr. Romneyaccomplished something deeper — he made himself a palatable alternative to Mr. Obama.
At one point he even swatted away an Obama attack by accusing the president of offering little else.
“Attacking me is not an agenda,” the Republican said.
At the end of Monday’s affair, Mr. Obama summed up the month’s debates by saying they framed the choice between the two candidates.
“You know, over the last four years, we’ve made real progress digging our way out of policies that gave us two prolonged wars, record deficits and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” he said. “And Governor Romney wants to take us back to those policies: a foreign policy that’s wrong and reckless; economic policies that won’t create jobs, won’t reduce our deficit, but will make sure that folks at the very top don’t have to play by the same rules that you do.”
In Monday’s foreign policy debate Mr. Romney hewed closely to the president’s approach when it came to action in Syria, Iran andAfghanistan. Indeed, at one point the president told Mr. Romney the only difference in their positions was “you’d say them louder.”
Instant polls showed Mr. Obama won the debate on points, and commentators on both sides of the aisle skewered Mr. Romney for failing to give a sense of what he’d do differently on world hotspots.
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