JUNE 5 GOP DEBATE: Pre- vs. Post-Debate Dial Test “Candidate Comfort Scale”: “How comfortable would you be with each candidate as your President, on a scale from zero to 10?”

(Our “Message Jury” was a cross-section of 14 GOP likely primary voters in Manchester, NH, who participated in a moment-to-moment dial test of the entire debate. Note this is not a representative sample of all New Hampshire voters.)

The candidates took a variety of rhetorical approaches to Iraq. McCain couldn’t back off of his support for the war, so he shrewdly attacked Hillary Clinton. This approach got him up into the 80s:

Also effective was to argue for rotating in Iraqi troops to take over for ours. Duncan Hunter scored in the mid-70s with his communication of that idea:

Far less effective was the approach of dividing Iraq, as advocated by Tommy Thompson and Sam Brownback:

And Ron Paul just can’t move the GOP voters in either NH or Iowa on this topic:

Possibly because he stated his opposition early in the debate to the war in Iraq, Democrats consistently gravitated to his argument throughout the debate, as these two snippets show. There was considerable evidence that in Des Moines at least, libertarianism is a darling ideology of Republicans. In fact, that’s very much to the contrary.