A less-popular Sarah Palin heads to debate
John McCain's running mate still appeals to many on a personal level, but other voters have grown wary of her experience.
When Sarah Palin was introduced five weeks ago as John McCain's running mate, her impact seemed seismic. With her injection of youth and energy to the Republican ticket, McCain's advisors predicted she would be a strong draw to women -- particularly independents and supporters of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton who were reluctant to back Barack Obama.
That seemed plausible as the Alaska governor attracted large crowds to rallies and was credited with a surge in the polls for McCain.
But as she faces her biggest test, tonight's debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, Palin's star power appears to have faded. She dropped out of the headlines as the financial crisis captured attention, and her shaky performance in interviews with CBS anchor Katie Couric was widely seen as a potential problem for the McCain campaign.
Palin is still enormously popular among Republicans and continues to stoke enthusiasm in the party's base, but as voters learn about her, many have started to view her unfavorably. After the GOP convention, more than half of the voters surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press said she was qualified to be president. In a Pew poll released Wednesday, just 37% said she would be ready to take over for McCain.
And polls now show little evidence to support the McCain campaign's hope that she will attract female swing voters in significant numbers.
A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll last month found that Palin held no particular sway with women. Among independent voters, she was more popular with men: 44% said they were more likely to vote for McCain because of Palin, whereas just 31% of women said so. The poll also found just a quarter of Clinton's former supporters were more inclined to choose the Arizona senator because of his running mate.
Irene Holcomb, a retiree from Duluth, Minn., is an independent voter who favored Clinton but now backs Obama. Initially, she said, she saw Palin as "the perfect woman," but she has watched her interviews and now says she "comes off like she really doesn't what she's talking about."
Like Holcomb, a number of female Clinton supporters surveyed said they were concerned about Palin's qualifications. Nearly all singled out her lack of foreign policy experience.
Kelly Knuth, a 48-year-old Democrat and Clinton supporter from Proctor, W.Va., was just the kind of undecided voter the McCain campaign hoped to win with Palin's selection.
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