Did Romney change his narrative?

We are slowly exiting the turbulent Convention/Debate polling period, and now we can begin to discern the effects of each party's efforts to change the race over the past month and a half. Obama entered September (late August) with about a two point lead, and it appears that he will exit with a lead in the 2-4 point range. The Democratic convention and Romney's 47% comments gave Obama the opportunity to run away with the race, but Romney's dramatic pivot from Tea Party severe conservative to Bush style compassionate conservative at the Denver debate, and Obama's lackluster performance there, cut off a real breakout by Obama.

Did Romney change the narrative of his campaign? He made a rhetorical change in the Denver debate, appearing to repudiate much of what he campaigned on during the primaries. His new approach was on display in late September at the Univision forum, so new Romney didn't come totally out of the blue. But it was a big change very late in the campaign, the kind of change voters can usually see through. It appears to have given voters cause to look at Romney again, and there are signs that women were particularly more open to voting for Romney after the first debate. Denver changed the media's tone about Romney, they decided that he was still in the race, but it didn't change how the media and voters view Romney, Obama's critique, embodied in Romney's 47% remark, stands.

The change in the polls looks to be mostly driven by changes in enthusiasm rather than by voters incorporating new information about a candidate. Democrats were not impressed by Obama's performance, and that lost enthusiasm showed up as Democratic voters dropping out in likely voter screens. Republicans were excited by a Romney who appeared to be able to connect to voters, and in some sense a moderate Romney gave them permission to support him, their rising enthusiasm pushed more Republican voters through the likely voter screens and buoyed Romney's numbers. Romney changed his narrative to the extent that his moderation gave Republicans permission to support him.

The Obama campaign reacted to defeat by doubling down on women's issues in their advertising and in the second presidential debate, and it looks like that solidified an eroding gender gap. Obama effectively maneuvered Romney into appearing to be a hectoring, overbearing, ignorant bully in the second debate, most dramatically in Romney's overreach on "act of terror" regarding the Benghazi attack ("Please proceed, Governor.")


Voters were very engaged with the debates, with more people watching both Presidential debates than watched the pivotal Bush/Clinton debates in '92. If there were ever an opportunity to change the course of a campaign these debates were it.


But in the end it does not appear that Romney changed the narrative of his campaign or the trajectory of the election. He may have accelerated Republicans coming home by a week or two (oddly by repudiating the Tea Party), but he didn't find new voters. If anything Obama comes out of the conventions and debates in a stronger position than he went in.

Building Android Cyanogenmod 10 for the Nook Color/encore

UPDATE: latest local_manifest.

A crew at xda have been working on CM10 for the Nook color, and I finally got around to building a copy for myself. I'm documenting my steps here.

I launch a c1.xlarge (High CPU) Amazon AWS spot instance, Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS, with a bid of $0.20. The process below takes just over two hours, and the market price for a c1.xlarge is $0.07, so the total cost to build is about $0.21. I bid high to keep the box from being terminated.

You should be able to cut and paste the following into a terminal.

http://pastebin.com/TZwXbpXM

screen -S admin
sudo mkdir /mnt/android
sudo chown ubuntu /mnt/android
ln -s /mnt/android ~/
mkdir ~/android/system
mkdir ~/bin
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y install git-core gnupg flex bison gperf libsdl1.2-dev libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev squashfs-tools build-essential zip curl libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev pngcrush schedtool libxml2-utils libxslt1.1 g++-multilib lib32z1-dev lib32ncurses5-dev lib32readline-gplv2-dev xsltproc openjdk-6-jdk

git config --global user.email 'john@example.com'
git config --global user.name 'Android Build'
git config --global color.ui true

cd ~/android/system/
curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo
repo init -u git://github.com/CyanogenMod/android.git -b jellybean
curl 'http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=vZFKdc8m' > .repo/local_manifest.xml
repo sync -j8
cd ~/android/system/device/bn/encore/
./setup-makefiles.sh
cd ~/android/system/vendor/cm/
./get-prebuilts
cd ~/android/system/
. build/envsetup.sh
brunch encore


All Done! Just copy the /mnt/android/system/out/target/product/encore/cm-10-*.zip file somewhere.

Amazing work by fattire, @krylon360, eyeballer, keyodi, sluo et al.