With the November Election Day approaching fast, the Presidential race is running neck-in-neck with the race between pundits and pollsters. Having already sliced the demographic pie thin, and heaped our plates with the dish on "Soccer Moms" to "Angry White Males"-and even more recently "Latinos," the pollster/pundits are serving up another demographic slice of the electoral pie: the Blue Collar Waitress.
Flooding the hungry battleground states with commercial dollars, even preempting local staple advertising, the two campaigns have reached a critical fork in the campaign. Following the first Presidential debate, in my Election 2012 Body Politic blog I discussed the potential social meaning and electoral value of body language, and showed Mitt Romney gaining a nearly 5% net sentiment lead over Barack Obama in a single day.
After the first and only VP debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, and with the second Presidential debate fast on the TV menu, we decided to benchmark the weekly social sentiment barometer for the past week in our NetBase Insight Composer analysis.
Notably, in the same week Obama registered a net sentiment loss of 3%, as opposed to Romney's 6% gain, the result in the one-week sentiment benchmark for the candidates was -2% and 14%, respectively. Simultaneously there has been a dampening effect on the degree of emotional language used in the electoral social conversation, with a 15 point Passion Intensity drop for Obama and a drop of 31 for Romney, as shown in the summary chart below.
What's behind these sudden shifts? And just who is swinging the sentiment numbers? Soccer moms? Angry white men? Latinos? Angry blue-collar waitresses? Big Bird?
At this critical turning point, every sliver of the voter pie sentiment counts.
As I noted in a recent blog that analyzed the significance of the Spanish-speaking Latino vote, Romney's past month average Net Sentiment got a debate boost from 46% to a weekly 59% high, overtaking Obama's marginal 49% sentiment lead last month, which fell to 46% in the week after the debate. Still, Latino discussions and candidate character carried an elevated emotional pitch, reflected in their high Passion Intensity scores.
According to one poll released on the eve of the first Presidential debate, Obama led Romney by 18 points among women likely to vote, reflecting an interesting shift away from the GOP by blue-collar women in swing states. Two weeks later, a new USA Today/Gallup Poll showed a shift in the opposite direction-with likely women voters in battleground states returning to the GOP.
Our own NetBase Gender snapshot this past week shows a close split, with women equally critical as enamored by each candidate, if not for the same reasons.
And yes, body language plays a key role in voter perception. Pointing and hand chopping are seen as aggressive and an upward facing palm warm and engaging; a perma-smile is held suspect, and a downward gaze is seen as insensitive or weak, excessive blinking is considered a sign of lying, a chronically shifting gaze appears manic, and grounded feet show confidence. However, according to many polls the significant reversal in Obama's lead after the opening salvo suggests more than debate performance is at play.
Truth be told, all the numbers carry voter sentiment- and they all count. I might speculate that with the startling all-fronts numbers seesawing, what we now seem to be witnessing is the raw voter experience. It's come down to the wire on economic and social welfare issues, as well as the weighing in of candidate character and credibility. Of course, showmanship also impacts swinging likely voters.
The social voter can't be expected to devour every slice of the demographic pie, although some may have insatiable appetites. In many ways, the voice of the social voter carries a unique weight, reflecting an unsolicited, unbiased sentiment. One might argue that the highly temporal nature of social sentiment diminishes its fluid quality and true value. But this only reinforces the need to monitor sentiment in real time, as well as to seek out the drivers of fluctuation in social voter sentiment.
Just food for thought as the second debate begins.