It might seem odd that Romney continues to play to the conservative base, but it looks like he still needs to.
I ran across an interesting blog written by media statistician, BruceGoerlich: Thought lobs from Goerlich's frontal lobe. He looked at who watched the recent conventions, and found some startling results. The conservatives didn't watch the Republican convention in numbers higher than normal T.V. viewing. And on the flip side, Liberals DID watch the Democratic convention in significantly higher numbers than normal. It kind of flies in the face of the Conservatives whining that the conservatives are fired up and the poll models are wrong.
What is interest to me about his approach is that it does not involve asking people what they think. When confronted with a question, people will answer it thinking that they should have an opinion even if they had not really thought about it before the question was asked. But by looking at the public's habits in the wild, so to speak, you get a truer picture of their engagement without poll induced bias.
Here is what he found.
The average composition of the audience to the Democratic Convention consisted of 21.2% conservatives, 40.8% liberals, and 38.2% of the aggregate of moderates/mixed and low interest. Compared to the primetime audience average during August to the first week of September for these same networks, we can see in the table below that Democrats were able to pick up 10% more liberals as part of their audience. Conservative composition fell by 7.5%, and the middle segments fell by 2.8%.
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But the Republican convention was less than stimulating to their base. Conservatives tuned in at 29.5% compared to 28.8% for normal prime time shows on the same networks, a shift of just 0.7%. Oddly, Liberal viewing went up by 2.5% from 30.2% to 32.7%.
The results for the Republican convention on FNN are even more interesting. Conservative viewers actually went down. Apparently the Conservative viewers went to other networks to watch the convention?
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So even with the more expanse coverage that the Republican convention received from the media compared to the Democratic convention, the base was not engaged enough to watch. Also interesting is the fact that the low interest viewership drop a bit for both conventions. At least at the time of the conventions, it does not appear that the undecided voters were all that interested in the race. Romney needs the base to turn out in 2010 numbers to have even a slight chance, but the enthusiasm does not appear to be there.
It will be interesting to see who watches the debates.