Coming into last night’s debate Christine O’Donnell had a formidable task. She’s down in the polls by double digits (polls just this weeks Coons led by 19%, 16%, 21% & 19%). She has very high unfavorables, 58% on two polls and a very large gender gap, -46% with women in one poll. Worse for O’Donnell she had more soft support than Coons, at least 2x of her voters said they could switch their vote. So O’Donnell had a huge task last night. She needed to reassure her soft voters, flip undecideds her way and flip a good portion of Coons’s support to herself. Was she up to the task?
Wednesday night’s nationally televised Delaware Senate debate showcased Christine O’Donnell’s great strength — as a feisty tea party upstart exuding personal charisma, as well as her primary weakness — as a flawed candidate carrying a heap of baggage who at times appeared out of her depths on substantive policy questions.
For good portions of the 90-minute face-off at the University of Delaware with Democrat Chris Coons, O’Donnell played aggressor, putting her opponent on the defensive about his votes for property tax hikes as a county official, his support for President Obama’s agenda and even his writings as a senior in college when he playfully referred to himself as a “bearded Marxist.”
…
Down double-digits in polling, O’Donnell positioned herself as the consistent aggressor, at several points interrupting Coons to land a punch or pose a counterpoint. She accused him of supporting the creation of “a culture of dependency” and singed him for signing onto an Afghanistan withdrawal policy that threatens the country’s security.
What do you think? Was she feisty, charismatic and aggressive? Did she dominate in some areas? Did she have good answers on her well-publicized weaknesses?
Jason330 points out her Palin moment, which probably stands out for a lot of people. I wanted to point out some other moments as well. One thing that O’Donnell needed to do is assure people she’s actually qualified for the Senate seat. Almost 2/3 of voters think she’s unqualified in several recent polls. I don’t think she accomplished that:
– She mixed up Iraq and Afghanistan in one question and needed to be corrected by Chris Coons.
– She confused the hell out of the audience on her health care answer when she said “no one disputes that health care didn’t need to be reformed.” She was actually trying to make a complex argument that health insurance isn’t health care, which is true. But her argument got to the point where she said that hospitals shouldn’t have to treat people if they can’t pay and that no one should pay for someone else’s health care (repeal Medicare?)
– She so muddled her Cap & Trade answer that Chris Coons had to probe to figure out what her attack was. She advanced a conspiracy, no doubt popular with the Delaware Politics crowd, that W.L. Gore, the company owned by Chris Coons’s stepfather, would benefit personally from Cap & Trade legislation. That seems to undermine her talking point, though, that business hates Cap & Trade and that it will kill jobs.
– She said that we were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and perhaps that we should keep doing it? It was muddled.
– She avoided questions about whether she accepted evolution. She flatly refuse at least three times to answer that question. She said it should be left to local school districts. This is wrong too, as evidenced in the recent Kitzmiller v Dover case. Public schools can’t teach religion, that’s in the Constitution.
– She also tried her best to avoid answering a DADT repeal question, but basically said she didn’t favor repeal. She also compared being gay to adultery.
Overall, I doubt she changed any minds or reassured anyone who had doubts about her. O’Donnell did benefit from absurdly low expectations (like Sarah Palin) where many people expected her to babble incoherently. I don’t think it was far off from that and I thought she was surprisingly bad in this debate considering she’s spent a lot of time in front of a camera. She didn’t control her facial expressions and came off as petulant or angry a lot of the time.