{"id":3985,"date":"2007-12-01T02:16:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-01T02:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html"},"modified":"2007-12-01T02:16:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-01T02:16:00","slug":"focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html","title":{"rendered":"Focus group reacts to GOP debate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Klein has an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.time-blog.com\/swampland\/2007\/11\/dialing_the_republicans.html\">interesting post<\/a> (shocking but true) about Frank Luntz&#8217;s focus group&#8217;s reaction during the debate:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>    In the next segment&#8211;the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee&#8217;s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants&#8211;I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, &#8220;After all, these are children of God,&#8221; the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.<br \/>\nBut there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture&#8211;specifically, about waterboarding&#8211;the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. &#8220;I don&#8217;t have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9\/11,&#8221; said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly.<br \/>\nThey also hated anything that Ron Paul said (high 30s to low 20s), especially on the war in Iraq.<br \/>\nThey tended to like Huckabee a lot (60s to 80s anytime he opened his mouth), but afterwards most said <span style=\"font-weight: bold\">he was too extreme, religiously, to be President<\/span>. Really, they did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s too funny that the group found Huckabee too extreme &#8212; hoisted on his own petard. I guess there are some Republicans who aren&#8217;t interested in a pastor-in-chief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Klein has an interesting post (shocking but true) about Frank Luntz&#8217;s focus group&#8217;s reaction during the debate: In the next segment&#8211;the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee&#8217;s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants&#8211;I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, &#8220;After all, these are children of God,&#8221; the dials&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":307,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[419,200,13,14,11,71],"class_list":["post-3985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-under-the-sun","tag-christianity","tag-huckabee","tag-politics","tag-presidential-election","tag-religion","tag-republicans"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Focus group reacts to GOP debate - Reformed Chicks Blabbing<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Focus group reacts to GOP debate - Reformed Chicks Blabbing\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Joe Klein has an interesting post (shocking but true) about Frank Luntz&#8217;s focus group&#8217;s reaction during the debate: In the next segment&#8211;the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee&#8217;s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants&#8211;I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, &#8220;After all, these are children of God,&#8221; the dials&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Reformed Chicks Blabbing\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-12-01T02:16:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"michele\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Focus group reacts to GOP debate - Reformed Chicks Blabbing","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Focus group reacts to GOP debate - Reformed Chicks Blabbing","og_description":"Joe Klein has an interesting post (shocking but true) about Frank Luntz&#8217;s focus group&#8217;s reaction during the debate: In the next segment&#8211;the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee&#8217;s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants&#8211;I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, &#8220;After all, these are children of God,&#8221; the dials&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html","og_site_name":"Reformed Chicks Blabbing","article_published_time":"2007-12-01T02:16:00+00:00","author":"michele","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html","name":"Focus group reacts to GOP debate - Reformed Chicks Blabbing","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/#website"},"datePublished":"2007-12-01T02:16:00+00:00","dateModified":"2007-12-01T02:16:00+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/#\/schema\/person\/8de1e1f06613d0c6f3bd8a276ac94ab0"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/2007\/12\/focus-group-reacts-to-gop-deba.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Focus group reacts to GOP debate"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/","name":"Reformed Chicks Blabbing","description":"Politics and current events from a Reformed perspective, by Michele McGinty","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/#\/schema\/person\/8de1e1f06613d0c6f3bd8a276ac94ab0","name":"michele","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"michele"},"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/author\/michele"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/reformedchicksblabbing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}