With only two days until the US election, the US Sunday morning talk shows had their favourite analysts and talking heads in to crunch the numbers and bicker over the details in anticipation of the big event.
Fox News Sunday brought together McCain’s campaign maganer Rick Davis and Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe. Davis latched on to the Mason-Dixon polls showing gains for McCain, while questioning less favourable results from Gallup polls and predicted a “slam-bang finish” from McCain: “It’s going to be wild. I think that we are able to close this campaign. John McCain may be the greatest closer politician of all time.” Plouffe predicted a higher turn-out from young and African-American voters while acknowledging their campaign has shared similarities with Bush’s Karl Rove-orchestrated campaign in 2004, mobilising voters at a local level with “neighbors, colleagues, friends and family” encouraging each other to vote. Read the full transcript here.
NBC’s Meet the Press had a round-table with journalists David Broder, David Gregory, Michele Norris and Chuck Todd, and chatted to Democratic Senator John Kerry and former Republican Senator Fred Thompson. Thompson discussed VP candidate Sarah Palin, claiming “she’s more accessible than either Barack Obama or Joe Biden on the campaign trail now” but “you haven’t read anything about her or anything she’s said recently because she, she hasn’t made any, any missteps” (err…), while Kerry defended Obama’s massive campaign spending, saying: “This isn’t the fat cat Washington money. This is average Americans who’ve come together in unprecedented numbers who are, in a sense, funding his campaign publicly.” Read the full transcript here.
CBS’s Face the Nation had Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and Republican Senator John Ensign. Schumer said he didn’t think his party would get the numbers for a filibuster-proof senate, while Ensign retracted his statement that Sarah Palin isn’t qualified to be the president: “What I said was Sarah Palin has brought out record crowds; that she, I believe, was mishandled by the campaign, but she has actually energised a large part of our base. But the presidential campaign is about the top of the ticket.” Read the full transcript here (pdf).
Late Edition on CNN hosted governors Tim Kaine and Mark Stanford, as well as journalists John Harris, David Folkenflik, Gloria Borger, Rachel Sklar, John Fund discussing, amongst other things, media bias in their coverage of the campaign. Harris, the editor-in-chief of Politico, defended the site’s more favourable coverage of Obama, saying: ”One of the strongest biases in the media is in favor of momentum. When things are going well with the candidate, we play up that candidate and that person can do no wrong. When the game shifts and it starts to go the other direction, the candidates really get clobbered in the press.” Read the full transcript here.
And ABC’s This Week hosted a round-table on election night predictions, with all participants calling a win for Obama. Watch the video here.
