Frank Luntz Focus Groups Palin

And the results aren’t promising:

…with some bad news for John McCain: they don’t like the choice of Sarah Palin for vice president. Only one person said Palin made him more likely to vote for McCain; about half the 25-member group raised their hands when asked if Palin made them less likely to vote for McCain. They had a negative impression of Palin by a 2-1 margin…a fact that was reinforced when they were given hand-dials and asked to react to Palin’s speech at her first appearance with McCain on Friday—the dials remained totally neutral as Palin went through her heart-warming(?) biography, and only blipped upwards when she said she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere–which wasn’t quite the truth, as we now know.

Read the whole thing — the group includes a Hillary supporter who apparently is planning on voting for McCain. She is very puzzled by this:

You know, I change my mind almost every day, but right now I”m wondering where the John McCain I really liked in 2000 went, what happened to the moderate? This John McCain has the look of someone who is being manipulated–probably by Karl Rove.”

If the Obama Team is as smart as I think they are, they won’t have to do much to attack or discredit Palin. They just need to keep working at undermining the McCain brand (which is all optics right now anyway), and showing folks just what a doctrinaire, George Bush-era conservative he is.