Tuning Out Rick Perry
Imagine the frustration if you'd spent huge amounts of money on advertisements aimed at improving your image and it hadn't helped one bit. Now you have an idea of how Rick Perry's campaign must be feeling right now.
Perry will launch his third advertisement tomorrow, a spot that portrays him as an outsider with the spine needed to shake up Washington. That ad will run alongside his second ad, which takes President Obama to task for his "lazy" comment a few days ago. All told, he'll spend $392,000 on the Iowa ads next week alone, according to a Republican source watching candidate ad campaigns.
(The new buy will include $165,000 on broadcast television in Des Moines, good for 900 gross ratings points; in Cedar Rapids, where he bought 700 points; and Sioux City, where he bought 600 points. Needless to say, those are very substantial buys. He's also up with $182,000 on 10 cable channels in Iowa, including ESPN, CNN, TNT and the Discovery Channel, and with $44,000 in radio ads in five key markets.)
Perry's three-week Fox News buy cost him $975,000; it expires November 30. All told, that means he's spent $2.8 million on advertisements in the last few weeks, including $1.8 million in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, far more than any other candidate in the race. His three ads -- a bio spot, a spot offering anti-Obama red meat and now the spot characterizing him as an outsider -- make up the classic story-telling progression.
And none of it has moved his public poll numbers one bit.
A Des Moines Register poll conducted up until the day Perry started his first Iowa ads, October 26, showed him at just 7 percent. A Bloomberg poll, conducted November 11-12 by the same company that conducted the Des Moines Register survey, Selzer & Co., showed Perry at an identical 7 percent. A concurrent survey conducted by Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway at the polling company inc. showed Perry at 5 percent.
Perry's tough time in debates has cost him his initial success in the polls; it's cost him fundraising momentum, as Hearst reported this week; and it's cost him potential staffers, several of whom have rethought their decisions to go to work for the campaign before even moving to Austin. Perry's opponents were smart to attack his record of job creation early; now, his strongest argument is a lot more nuanced than "I created a million new jobs."
Some Republicans even criticize the ads themselves. All three have Perry speaking straight to the camera. If the problem a campaign faces is with their candidate's image, outside validation might prove more successful at rehabilitating that image than putting the candidate on screen.
But there's a deeper, more troubling reason some Republican strategists suspect the poll numbers aren't moving numbers: All the ads in the world can't convince voters to back a candidate they've already concluded isn't qualified for the job.
And though he has the money to stay on the air and give Mitt Romney a run for his money, Perry may have crossed that threshold with too many voters.
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