 |
         
|
Moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS received more plaudits from supporters of Barack Obama than from John McCain's supporters for her conduct of the Vice-Presidential debate in St Louis.
Volunteers joined an online panel to rate the debate on a Citizens' Media Scorecard hosted by freepress.net, where these results are crossposted. More than 2,500 responded. The two groups of partisans were loyal to their own candidate: 80% of McCain supporters though Sarah Palin won the debate; 89% of Obama supporters gave the nod to Joe Biden. The differences emerge in how satisfied they were with Ifill's performance.
Ifill received higher marks from Obama partisans for conducting an extremely serious and relevant debate (74% v 56% for McCain's), for showing no favoritism (94% v 52%), and for overall excellence (55% v 23%). By wide margins compared with McCain backers, more Obama supporters found Ifill to be extremely intelligent (65% v 33%) and plainspoken (71% v 46%), and saw her avoiding the pitfalls of being controling (93% v 63%) and opinionated (95% v 62%).
Both groups tended to criticize her for being too reticent (70% of Obama voters, 75% of McCain's) in challenging the factual accuracy of the debaters' statements.
The debate covered a wide range of topics. Large majorities of both groups of supporters combined approved of Ifill's selection as giving just the right amount of time to six major issues: nuclear proliferation (76%), global warming (74%), war & peace (73%), the global war on terrorism (73%), tax policy (70%) and energy policy (70%).
Both groups gave Ifill a black mark for skipping the topics of Social Security (84%) and immigration (81%). The major disagreement was on the topic of poverty: half of the McCain voters in our panel thought its treatment was "just right" (53%); most of the Obama voters called it "not enough" (83%).
McCain supporters were less likely to believe that Palin won the debate in its foreign policy section (71%) and on economic issues (73%) than on social policies (84%). Obama supporters believed almost unanimously that Biden prevailed in all three topic areas (96%, 92% and 96% respectively).
About half of Obama's supporters (51%) criticized Ifill for failing to spend more time questioning Palin about her readiness and qualifications for the Vice-Presidential office whereas many fewer McCain supporters (29%) offered equivalent criticism concerning questions about Biden. By contrast, most McCain supporters welcomed the debate for being "extremely helpful" in learning about Palin's policy positions (68% v 57% of Obama supporters learning about Biden). Compare the lessons learned about Palin in this debate with the lessons learned about McCain himself last week in the first Presidential debate: twice as many McCain supporters found St Louis extremely helpful as a learning experience (39% v 20%) compared with Mississippi.
Although Free Press extended outreach to all parts of the political spectrum, of the 2631 volunteers who participated in the scorecard, Obama supporters vastly outnumbered McCain's (2144 v 229). To correct for that imbalance, these results have been reported by contrasting the ratings of the two groups rather than combining them, which would have drowned out the Republican perspective. Consisting of volunteers rather than a random sample, these results cannot be projected to the population at large.
The two groups of supporters tended to watch the debate on different outlets. MSNBC (27%), PBS (22%) and CNN (17%) were the favorite outlet for Obama partisans. Fox News Channel was the favorite for fully 54% of the McCain voters in the panel.
Again, as we found after the Mississippi debate, we need to recruit a more diverse panel for subsequent debates. We repeat our request to Fox News to give us a hand with some outreach.
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
