by WonkoKevin

The popular metaphor right now, in both parties, is the circular firing squad. Candidates are spending more time shooting each other and less time attacking the other side (except if the target is Hillary Clinton, that is). Democrats are worrying the Clinton-Obama mud throwing will disrupt an already planned-for Fall victory party (as if Obama or Clinton supporters are not going to show up or will vote Republican otherwise, yeah…), and Republicans see Mitt Romney fighting a two-front, nasty war with both John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Well, the candidates and their campaigns may be being mean to each other, but it ain’t so in the Wonkosphere. It’s downright nice these days! Oh, it’s been nasty, but most bloggers’ attentions seem to have turned towards being cheerleaders rather than critics.

Case in point: At the top of the conservative buzz column in Wonkosphere yesterday was a post by NewsBusters entitled NYT: Everybody Hates Mitt Romney. The title is a bit of hyperbole though; the actual title of the NYT article was Romney Leads in Ill-Will Amongst G.O.P. Candidates. The key word here is “amongst”, because the article is really about the other candidates’ dislike of Romney. So is it true that everybody hates Mitt Romney? Certainly not the conservative Wonkosphere. The graph below shows the tone of Romney’s buzz from conservatives (red) and liberals (blue) over the last two weeks; the grey bands represent the average plus/minus one standard deviation. Romney’s buzz tone has been consistently above the norm from conservatives, and has even been above the norm on the liberal side in the past week. Additionally, the 0.10 line is what we use as a break-point for significant negativity, and he’s been above that amongst liberals 12 out of the last 14 days. Romney has had negative buzz tone–for about six straight weeks in November-December–but now the mass of bloggers are primarily talking positive about him. The same is true across the board–for the most part, the average buzz tone now is significantly higher than it was in December and early January. Bloggers are generally more interested in speaking up their own candidate than speaking down someone else. This also may be a natural progression to that “party unity” that everyone is afraid of not having. As supporters begin to realize that the competitor candidate might be their nominee, I think they naturally begin to back off, a bit. If Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul were ahead, we might see different, but for now expect more punches to be thrown by the campaigns than by their supporters.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 7:36 am and is filed under Romney, Politics 2.0. 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.