How Much Does the Media Love Thee?
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UPDATE: Gallup has a story up today assessing the impact of Obama's trip with the intro, "Could John McCain benefit from Barack Obama's much-publicized foreign trip? Several observations from the just-completed USA Today/Gallup poll suggest that this is a possibility."
Overall, though, if you troll through the numbers, it looks like the trip was more or less a wash: Dems liked it, Republicans didn't, and Indies were split. Obama's fav/unfav rating suffered a bit with Republicans and Indies, but not a drastic amount.
And again, these numbers represent an immediate reaction to what people have just seen, when the real potential value in the trip for Obama will come in the crucial nine weeks between Labor Day and Election day when he can refer back to this trip a credential builder and a preview of what an Obama-led administration would look like.
Gallup also tackled the question of why its new poll showed such a discrepancy between registered voters (Obama +3) and likely voters (McCain +4):
The reasons for the shift between registered and likely voters in this poll compared to previous polls is not entirely clear, but the data show that in this poll, Republicans have become slightly more likely to say they are giving quite a lot of thought to the election, while independents and Democrats are giving less thought -- compared to what has been the case throughout this year. In other words, Republicans have become more attentive to the election on a relative basis, which increases their percentage of the likely voter pool. A Democratic advantage in thought given to the election (and indeed in qualifying as a likely voter, according to Gallup's model) is not the norm historically, so in some ways, after the excitement of the Democratic nomination campaign has subsided, the current poll may suggest that the electorate is returning to a more normal state of affairs.
Implications
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact causes of any of these changes. But the available data show that Republicans are strongly convinced that the media are much too positive in their coverage of Obama and too negative in their coverage of McCain. The media's coverage of Obama's foreign trip, coupled with a strong reaction from McCain and other conservatives, may have created the seemingly paradoxical effect of increasing Republicans' energy and excitement about voting for McCain. If this is the case, the degree to which this is short-term versus long-term is still not clear.
