The republicans have been sending out anti-Obama emails for at least a year. Maybe that's why McCain has a little hope in him.
Swamp: This election campaign has seen no shortage of scurrilous and "viral'' chain email - you know, like the ones that suggest that Barack Obama is a radical Muslim or that he is unpatriotic, eschewing the flag pin and even allegiance to his nation.
The impact of all this remains unknown.
But, with the help of some students of political science, professors at Elmhurst College set out early this election season to gauge the potential impact of the email-campaign on voters.
They ran an experiment: They randomly assigned 363 students to double-blind tests. One group would receive a piece of "hate-mail.'' Another would get "second-hand exposure,'' such as reading about a hateful e-mail in a newspaper account.
Their preliminary findings: Voter-choice was not altered by exposure to the email, either firsthand or secondhand. Yet, still Obama's "feeling thermometer scores'' dropped in the condition where subjects read the email, and the temperature for him rose in conditions where they read a rebuttal from Obama's Web-site.
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"Our results suggest that these types of personal candidate attacks can have an affect on citizen preferences,'' Professors Phillip Hardy and Mary Walsh write in a draft of their report graciously shared with the Tribune. "The preliminary findings from our study point to (1) decreased feeling thermometer scores toward the target candidate; (2) a diminished sense of empathy and morality associated with him; and (3) fear of Obama's religious background.
They've also concluded that "this type of communication (i.e., chain emails) is likely to continue in future campaigns, and it does not appear to be benign or meaningless,'' in the words of Hardy, who will present the study with Walsh at the Illinois association of political scientists after the election.
....
"Our results suggest that these types of personal candidate attacks can have an affect on citizen preferences,'' Professors Phillip Hardy and Mary Walsh write in a draft of their report graciously shared with the Tribune. "The preliminary findings from our study point to (1) decreased feeling thermometer scores toward the target candidate; (2) a diminished sense of empathy and morality associated with him; and (3) fear of Obama's religious background.
