# Posted 1:35 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

BLOGGERS' BREAKFAST, 8:00 AM, Southgate Hotel:

After five hours of sleep and a sweltering subway ride, I want coffee but won’t touch anything hot. I go for the ice water instead. The speaker at our breakfast is Matthew Dowd, a top strategist and spokesman for the Bush campaign. Even though his job is to spin, Dowd talks in an affable and friendly manner. That’s the first rule of good spin.

Dowd begins by describing what he calls the basic assumptions on which Bush’s strategy rests. First and foremost, there are very few swing voters left. More than ninety and close to ninety-five percent of voters are fully committed and evenly split between the parties. Thus, turning out the base is a high priority.

On the other hand, there are around 60 electoral votes that will be decided by a total of fewer than 50,000 ballots. It’s going be close, but Dowd says he’s optimistic. It sounds like spin. He said that Bush is even with Kerry or possibly a point or two ahead – but that’s where the campaign expected things to be after the convention. QED, whatever support Kerry got from his convention was temporary and superficial.

Perhaps. If the Bush campaign expected to be behind in the polls coming into the convention it’s because they expected a bigger Democratic bounce.

Next, the Q&A. Can bloggers be as tough as professionals? If they can, do they want to be as tough, given that this meeting is Red-on-Red? My gut instinct is to ask the toughest question I can about the Swift Vets. But I decide to hold back and get a feel for the room before opening fire.

The first questioner observes that the Dean campaign had a problem staying on message even on its own website but that the Bush campaign seems to be doing better. It’s a softball, and Dowd softly concurs that his people are doing a better job.

Another questioner -- I can’t remember all of the questions or their exact order -- picks up on Dowd’s comment that the Bush campaign hasn’t had a lot of success with internet ad buys. Can Dowd be more specific about what wasn’t going right? His answer is that it’s hard to know exactly who your audience is on the net. Interestingly enough, that was the same point Jeff Jarvis made back at BloggerCon II when. According to Jeff, the biggest thing getting in the way of bloggers selling more ads is precise information about who exactly is reading out sites.

Now a question about polls. This morning’s Gallup shows even or ahead in Pennsylvania. How is the swing state forecast looking? Dowd makes an interesting point which I haven’t thought about much: most states have a fixed relationship to national polls, leaning Democratic or GOP by a stable percentage. But Pennsylvania used to lean Democratic by a handful of points but now tracks the national polls precisely. The bad news for the GOP is that Ohio has moved in the other direction. But the really interesting state may be Wisconsin, which could go Republican and would force Kerry to pick up Ohio or Florida if he wants to win.

At this point, I was beginning to feel that I had to ask Dowd something a lot tougher than he’d faced so far. Dammit, we’re David and they’re Goliath. But I didn’t just want to be a hardass just for the hellavit. “Real” journalists do that all the time and just come off as arrogant and condescending. So I wanted to ask a question whose answer I actually cared about and could learn something from.

Here’s what I came up with: You said that this convention is going to focus on the President's vision for the future. But given that most voters judge an incumbent based on his record, not his plans, might that indicate a lack of confidence in what Bush has accomplished? As Ronald Reagan memorably asked in both 1980 and 1984, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?

On a related note, voters' habit of judging a candidate based on his record explains why undecideds tend to break for the challenger at the last moment. Do you agree with the consensus and does that mean that Bush has to go into election day with a 2 or 3 point lead in order to win?

Here's what Dowd said: His research shows that voters do tend to be retrospective, but that they care about the state of the nation more than the state of their pocketbooks. Also, they tend to vote on the basis of the past year, not as Reagan suggested, the past four. Thus, the recent economic recovery may help the President. Finally, those who lean toward a candidate but aren't sure about supporting him do want to hear about the future.

When it comes to the undecideds, Dowd said that undecideds are traditionally those voters who haven't had access to a lot of information. But this year, both campaigns have already far outspent their counterparts in the last incumbent-challenger race in 1996. Thus, if people haven't made up their mind, it probably means that can't decide and aren't going to vote.

Is that right? I think Dowd is being too optimistic about the undecideds. But as one of my fellow bloggers pointed out, they may break for the incumbent in a wartime situation.

On a different note, I think Dowd is right that voters care more about the state of the nation than the state of their pocketbooks. I have no idea, however, how many years backward they look while forming their opinions.

Well, that was a long post for a breakfast that only lasted one hour. Let's move on...
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion