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Haley Barbour: Debates alone won't decide election
Mitt Romney needs to deliver a strong debate performance on Wednesday but will be hard-pressed to completely alter the trajectory of the campaign in one appearance, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) said Monday afternoon.
The top Romney surrogate’s comments came in a conference call where GOP pollsters voiced concerns about Romney's appeals to undecided voters.
"We still have five weeks… I would be surprised if 100 percent of that is achieved in just the debates," Barbour said when asked if the GOP nominee could fix middle-class voters' perception that he does not understand their struggles as well as flesh out more policy details during the three presidential debates.
"Romney has time both through the debates and in other ways to make the sale. I think the burden is on him — it's his election to win, has been the whole time. He has to do it," he added.
"If the election stays about process, polling, focus ground, campaign management, that's all to Obama's favor," he continued. But Barbour added that if Romney could return focus to the economy he could still defeat the president.
The former governor and Republican National Committee chairman, one of the most powerful figures in the GOP establishment, made the remarks on a conference call with the center-right outside research group Resurgent Republic. The group has conducted a series of focus groups with swing voters who backed Obama last election — and their latest conclusions are that Romney is struggling to peel away key constituencies necessary to victory, specifically blue-collar voters and suburban women who backed Obama last time but are up for grabs this election.
"The chief problem facing Republicans is [swing voters] believe the president inherited a fiscal mess and needs more time to turn it around," top GOP pollster Linda DiVall, who conducted focus groups with suburban women in Richmond, said on the call.
DiVall said Romney's campaign started off on the right note with ads defining what he'd do on his first day in office but had moved on too quickly from that message and allowed Obama to define him.
"It's almost as if in this environment he could have repeated those ads and done himself some good," she said.
According to DiVall, Romney has to use the debates to show middle-class Americans that he has "a connection to what these voters have gone through the last four years," claiming that the GOP candidate is facing less a likeability gap and more concern from these voters that he doesn't understand their economic challenges.
"The challenge for Gov. Romney is to relate to people personally and provide some inspiration that their quality of life will improve," she said, calling for a "more distinct plan" on the economy.
"There is indeed an opportunity for Gov. Romney to hit the reset button but the challenge is these swing women want to hear more details of his economic plan," she continued.
Ed Goeas, who conducted focus groups with blue-collar men and women in Ohio, said that many of them said they felt they were slipping out of the middle class but also were less than willing to blame Obama.
But Goeas warned that while male blue-collar voters were still open to Romney, females had begun to harden against him, saying there was "much less potential with the women" in his focus groups to convince them to vote for Romney.
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