Values Voter Debate: Who Won, Who Lost?

You’ve already heard my opinion of who won and who lost in the Values Voter Debate, what about the opinion of the folks there?  It’s actually quite interesting. They’ve put up a chart of a pre and post-debate survey they did asking voters to rate the strength of respective candidates. (For some reason, Tom Tancredo’s aren’t included, but I won’t dwell on that.)

This may be far more useful than the strawpoll as the strawpoll only determines their allegiances at the moment, while their views on the strength of the candidate may determine who they’ll vote for should they favored candidate stumble in the early going.

Some candidates picked up support during the debate, while others lost it, so I’m going to divide this into the winners and the losers based on who gained the most people who viewed them as Neutral (5) or better on the 9 point scale:

Very interesting, particularly Sam Brownback’s performance. Brownback actually was thought to have done poorly by many showed that attendance counts. Only one candidate who showed up suffered a loss of opinion from the audience. (more on that in just bit.)

John Cox was a big winner, making a good first impression on a powerful constituency. It’s enough to get his foot into a lot of doors.

What about Mike Huckabee? There was no doubt Huckabee impressed. Many gravitated towards him, as the percentage of those who gave Huckabee a rating of “9″ climbed from 31 to 68. However, what the poll does show is that much of Huckabee’s support came to voters predisposed to view positively.

Now to those who didn’t do so well:

The big losers here were Thompson and then McCain. I was kind of surprised this hurt McCain so much (how did he have 49% viewing him as a strong candidate anyway?) But McCain’s absence and reminders of Amnesty and McCain-Feingold did it for him. As for Thompson, he entered this thing with a very strong view from the delegates, but absence didn’t encourage him. If Thompson has the combination of warmth and charm we’re told there was little reason for him to skip out.

Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani didn’t lose a whole lot by skipping the debate. They had little support coming in, but the opposition to them hardened and what little chance that had of easing it was made more difficult.

As for Ron Paul, compared to the massive losses of other candidates, his losses weren’t significant. He’s well known outside of Washington as a pro-life Fiscal Hawk, however when people find out that he doesn’t understand the fundamental threat of terrorism and that he’s fairly social libertarian, he’ll lose some votes, but gain others. But by coming to the event, Paul avoided suffering major losses and (actually finished 2nd