Obama wins the Debate with Australians - hands down

Thursday, 18 October 2012, 9:59 am
Article: Roy Morgan Research

Obama wins the Debate with Australians - hands down

Hundreds of Australians have given their second-by-second reactions to highlights of the US Presidential Debate today with the Roy Morgan Reactor. While commentators in the USA are calling it a narrow victory for Obama, Australians are far more definitive, reacting positively to nearly everything President Obama said while scoring Mitt Romney below the critical 50% mark for most of the time.

Click for big version.
Click here to view full Reactor with selectable graphs synchronised with video highlights of the debate.

Michele Levine, CEO, Roy Morgan Research says:

“We frequently see major difference in the way males and females react to political speeches but, in this case, the differences were almost imperceptible. The Americans obviously aren’t suffering from the same gender divide that has been so fractious recently in Australian politics.
“We would have expected to see more divergence in the Reactor graph lines for Australians who usually vote ALP Vs. L-NP but, again, the differences were marginal.

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“It’s probably not surprising that 18-34 year olds reacted more positively to President Obama than to Mitt Romney. The difference in age groups was relatively insignificant for Romney, however, but much greater for Obama, as the graph above clearly shows.”

There were few high points for Mitt Romney. He was getting traction with his promise to support small business and reduce their taxes – until he began to criticise ‘Obamacare’ when the Graph took a dive. If he’s been watching the Reactor graph he probably wouldn’t have mentioned ‘Obamacare’ again. But he did – which drove the graph for the 18 -34 year olds down around the 30 mark, which is a drastically low Reactor score.

Conversely, President Obama receives some of his highest Reactor scores with his record of healthcare reforms, ending the war in Iraq, reigning in the excesses of Wall Street and, predictably, tax cuts.

Ms. Levine:

“The President won the hearts of Australians when he gave his impromptu, impassioned speech about the contributions of immigrants to the United States.”

Click here to view the results with selectable graphs synchronised with the video highlights of the debate click on this link to the interactive Reactor Player.

ENDS

Roy Morgan Research

New Zealand's leading social and market research company

A full service research organisation specialising in omnibus and syndicated data, Roy Morgan Research has over 70 years' experience in collecting objective, independent information on consumers. Roy Morgan Research was set up in New Zealand in the 1990s and has been collecting information across a wide range of industries in New Zealand ever since. Roy Morgan currently has over 10 years of trended data on a geographically and demographically representative sample of over 12,000 New Zealanders aged 14+.

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