The study tested 24 messages — 12 by each candidate from their convention address. | AP Photos Poll exclusive: Obama winning message war

President Barack Obama is a campaign messaging guru, while Mitt Romney is struggling to find a theme that works, according to a new poll Wednesday that used methods for measuring the effectiveness of corporate branding and applied them to political candidates.

Pollsters from the Democratic firm of Penn Schoen Berland said there were several striking findings in their survey — for one, Obama is successfully making the election a referendum on Republicans, while Romney’s attempt to make the race a referendum on the last four years is falling flat with voters. And the Republican hopeful had only one theme that was breaking through with independent voters — his attacks on Obama’s handling of violence in the Middle East, the survey showed.


Of the 24 messages tested — 12 quotes by each candidate from their respective convention addresses and subsequent stump speeches — the top eight were all from Obama.

Obama’s highest scoring message was his line at the Democratic National Convention last month telling voters they should not choose Romney and Republican policies because “we have been there, we’ve tried that, and we’re not going back.” Romney, meanwhile, just squeaked into the top 10 list of the most compelling messages with his convention line on America needing “jobs. Lots of jobs,” which landed in ninth.

Penn Schoen Berland — which now mostly serves Fortune 500 companies and international political campaigns but was previously very involved in domestic politics and the campaigns of Bill and Hillary Clinton — also found that Obama’s best messages stack up well compared to those of the corporate world, with the president scoring better than 58 percent of product messages from the Fortune 500, while Romney ranked in the bottom 30 percent.

“If it were corporate America, we’d say [Obama’s score is] good, but not great,” said Billy Mann, Penn Schoen Berland’s managing director. “But we have to recognize it’s tougher for politicians than it is for corporations because people are so skeptical about the political process. …What it’s telling us is Obama’s done a very good job of messaging here. Romney’s still missing the mark.”

The company used its trademarked “Message Master” system and conducted the poll online in order to easily expose people to a large number of lengthy quotes. The firm asked likely voters to read a message and then answer three questions — whether they found the message believable, whether it made them more or less favorable to the candidate and then whether the statement makes them more or less likely to vote for the candidate. After that, Penn Schoen Berland created an index score based on the how well the message scored on all three questions.

Penn Schoen Berland also tested the presidential statements against the company’s “Message Cloud” which the firm believes is the world’s largest database of corporate messages. This is the first time the firm has tested presidential messaging against corporate ones, he added.



Obama’s top two testing messages set up Romney as supportive of old Bush-era policies that have failed in the past, with the No. 1 overall presidential race message coming from the Obama’s Charlotte convention speech on Sept. 6:

“I don’t believe that firing teachers or kicking students off financial aid will grow the economy, or help us compete with the scientists and engineers coming out of China. After all that we’ve been through, I don’t believe that rolling back regulations on Wall Street will help the small businesswoman expand, or the laid-off construction worker keep his home. We have been there, we’ve tried that, and we’re not going back.”

And the second most successful Obama message was from a campaign event in Woodbridge, Va., on Sept. 21, where he told voters:

“Top-down economics don’t work. This country doesn’t succeed when only the rich are getting richer. We succeed when folks at the top are doing well, but also when the middle class is doing well, and folks who are fighting to get into the middle are doing well; when more people have a chance to get ahead and live up to their God-given potential.”

And Mann said one thing he found “beyond striking” was that one of the Romney campaign’s main themes — “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” — is not making an impact among independent voters. Romney only has one message that is resonating with independents, Mann said, and that’s his foreign policy critique of the president that ranked at No. 12:

“The President said the developments in the Middle East are ‘bumps in the road.’ Bumps in the road? We had an ambassador assassinated. We had a Muslim Brotherhood member elected to the presidency of Egypt. Twenty thousand people have been killed in Syria. We have tumult in Pakistan, and of course Iran is that much closer to having the capacity to build a nuclear weapon,” Romney said at a campaign event in Pueblo, Colo., on Sept. 24.

The polling firm only tested quotes from two candidates during their convention addresses and in their post-convention stump speeches — so while Obama attacks on Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe were included, Romney’s critique of Obama’s claim that “you didn’t build that” was not part of this survey because the candidate has not used that in the time frame of the poll, Mann said. Overall, Romney’s top scoring message, ranking ninth, was from his convention address and focused on the issue of American jobs:

“Many Americans have given up on this president, but they haven’t ever thought about giving up. Not on themselves. Not on each other. And not on America. What is needed in our country today is not complicated or profound. It doesn’t take a special government commission to tell us what America needs. What America needs is jobs. Lots of jobs,” Romney said on Aug. 30 in Tampa.

His other top 10 message, at No. 10 overall, was from his stump speech and focused again on jobs and the poor prospects Americans will face if policies don’t change:

“Do you want four more years with 23 million Americans struggling to find a good job? Do you want four more years where every single year, median incomes go down? Do you want four more years where half the kids coming out of college can’t find a college-level job? It’s very clear that we can’t afford four more years like the last four years,” he said in Jefferson County, Colo., on Sept. 23.

Meanwhile, scraping the bottom of the barrel for Obama — scoring 18th out of 24 messages — was his take on the government he gave during his convention address:

“We don’t think the government can solve all our problems. But we don’t think that the government is the source of all our problems, any more than are welfare recipients, or corporations, or unions, or immigrants, or gays, or any other group we’re told to blame for our troubles. Because, America, we understand that this democracy is ours,” he said in Charlotte.

And the lowest scoring message overall was Romney’s “12 million jobs” line from a campaign rally in Jefferson County, Colo., on Sept. 23, 2012:

“The path I would take is bold new ideas to deal with an economy that’s very different than what we’ve experienced before. My choice will lead us on a path that will create 12 million new jobs and rising take-home pay.”

If Romney doesn’t shift his messaging soon to play up the ones that work, like his foreign policy attack on Obama, he could find himself on the path to defeat, Mann said.

“If Romney hopes to close the campaign by putting that question to Americans — ‘are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ — it’s pretty likely that Mitt Romney’s not going to end up better off than he was four years ago,” Mann said.

Penn Schoen Berland polled 1,003 likely voters online from Sept. 28 to Oct. 1. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.