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Anonymous
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Rasmussen Poll on William Ayers
With the McCain campaign talking about 1960s radical William Ayers all the time, Rasmussen ran a poll to see what people think about him. Not surprisingly most people have an unfavorable view of Ayers that cuts across gender, age, ideology, income, race, education, and everything else. Ayers is not going to win the camper-of-the-week award. However, a more interesting question is whether all this talk of Ayers helps or hurts the McCain campaign. Republicans think it helps the campaign by 2 to 1 while Democrats think it hurts McCain's campaign by 8 to 1. Independents thinks it hurts by nearly 2 to 1. In a similar vein, 47% of self-identifying conservatives thinks it helps the campaign vs. 29% think it hurts. Among liberals the numbers are 7% and 79%. Among moderates 20% think it helps and 58% think it hurts. Thus among moderates, talk of Ayers hurts McCain by nearly 3 to 1. There is no correlation with income or education. So why does McCain keep harping on this point? Is he trying to solidify his base and doesn't give a hoot about the independents? The numbers show this is a terrible strategy as it plays to the people who are already going to vote for him but it works badly with the critical independents he desperately needs. Could it be that Steve Schmidt has drunk his own Kool-Aid and really and truly believes that talking about Ayers helps him? Surely he has the same numbers Rasmussen does. Sometimes ideology gets in the way of running an effective campaign.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/