by WonkoSteve

At breakfast on Friday WonkoKevin and I were discussing the impact of Tancredo’s swan-song endorsement of Romney.  WonkoKevin opined that since Tancredo was the immigration candidate and this is such an important issue to the conservatives, that Romney would likely benefit by improving his standing on the immigration issue.  Not being one who thinks mere opinion is adequate where emprical data is available, I gave it a couple of days and went to the Wonkosphere database to see if there was any evidence of an improvement for Romney on posts having to do with immigration.

I exracted all posts that mentioned both Romey and immigration from the 20th on, and did the same for posts from the 16th through the 19th (to get a similar number of posts).  I then computed before and after averages on this selection for all the posts, for posts from the conservative sphere, and for posts that talked signigicantly about immigration (i.e. more than just a mention). 

The most drastic change is the number of Romney posts that talked significantly about immigration, which increased 11% from 64% before to 75% after.   The tone did not differ significantly for any of the three selections, so if people were talking about Romey and immigration more, they were not talking about it any more positively or negatively. 

The other results look like the following.  Influence is the extent to which a word is important in structuring the posts.  Figures shown represent changes from before to after:

Selection	Influence of “immigration”	Influence of “Romney”
All Posts	+2.8%	+2.4%
Conservative Posts	+1.6%	+4.69%
Significant Immigration Posts	+3.2%	+3.8%

So overall, we can say that for the three days after the Tancredo endorsement people who talk about Romney were talking about immigration more, and the words “immigration” and “Romney” were both more important in structuring the posts, relative to the three days before Tancredo’s endorsement.  

On the other hand there was no significant shift in the tone of these posts, so it is not as if people were suddenly talking more positively about Romney as a result.  Thus it’s questinable whether these changes represent much value for the candidate. 

In fact, Romney’s tone numbers have slipped significantly below averae since the 20th while his buzz share has been going up.  That’s a bad combination, especially this close to Iowa.  The main cause seems to be the “it depends on what the meaning of ’saw’ is” controversy surrounding his immagined memory of his dad marching with MLK. Whatever immigration bump he might have received from Tancredo was probably washed away in the deluge resulting from his poor handling of this story.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Romney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.