Mitt Romney’s www.mittromney.com HomePage Analyzed 9 June 2011

Now that more and more hopefuls are declaring their candidacy we are able to return to our tried and true method (see Reading Virtual Minds Volume 1: Science and History) to determine how well they’ll do in their presidential bids.

Here we analyze Mitt Romney’s Mitt Romney for President homepage.

Political Messaging
Part 1 – What Mitt Romney Wants You to Believe

There’s definitely strong belief that Mitt Romney is both Leadership Material and Electable, however he’s not as Electable as he is a good Leader. Usually Electability is based on being Leadership Material so Electability should be greater (not too much so. They do go hand in hand) than Leadership. The reverse shown here indicates some doubts about Electability (although no doubts about Leadership) at this point in time.

The strongest message is Vision for the Country. Again, Vision and Vision or the Country go hand in hand and the latter being twice the former indicates that there is a definite Vision for the Country and a doubt that Mitt Romney will be a part of that vision.

The rest of the chart should be understandable based on previous analyses.

Previous analysis brings us to the comparison of Mitt Romney for President with the results from analyzing Mitt Romney’s CPAC 2011 speech. When that speech was made, Mitt Romney and his camp were much less sure of his Leadership and Electability. Perhaps his decision to run as well as current world and economic events have bolstered his belief in himself.

The Vision and Vision for the Country values are still off by a factor of two or so, although now it appears Mitt Romney’s Vision for the Country is much more a talking point than it was when he made his 2011 CPAC speech. Perhaps his Vision has cleared?

He’s Listening and Listening to You more than he was at CPAC, this is a good thing as far as voters go. An interesting shift is that while Lead and Get Us Out are both strong, Lead has taken a backseat to Vision for the Country. This shift indicates a belief or knowledge of where we should be and a lesser belief that he’s the one to do it.

He is, however, more a Person of the People than he was at CPAC, perhaps due to his having to deal with so many questions about his past political stands and religious beliefs.

Political Messaging
Part 2 – What Mitt Romney’s Content Provider Thinks

The site designers and content providers have low confidence in Mitt Romney’s ability to win the election at present. Perhaps this will change as time goes on. What they do have is a strong belief that fact-checking is fruitless at this point in time. I think we’ll be seeing this fruitless fact-checking factor quite a bit in official campaign sites regardless of candidate. It seems to go with the territory.

Again comparing this analysis to Mitt Romney’s CPAC 2011 speech. Both have Confidence values around -60%, too close to make much of a difference. The real change is in the BlueSky factor. Now it’s 51%, then it was 17%. As I noted above, BlueSky abounds in political rhetoric.

Gender Persuasion

Here it is worthwhile to make a direct comparison — there’s no significant difference between these values and those shown in Mitt Romney’s CPAC 2011 speech. It would be worth knowing some history on Mitt Romney’s speech writers and content creators as that might provide a clue to this level of consistency.

Age Persuasion

The homepage is targeting younger voters, although it might not be doing so for the best reasons. Good reasons are the use of rotating images (2 on the right), video (3) and strong, clear imagery(5), iconography (1&4), the prominently displayed younger voter (3) and overall color and language. What may be unintentionally appealing to the youth vote and possibly for undesirable reasons is Mitt Romney’s image (5). The picture is difficult to parse visually and the extra effort allows visitors — especially youthful visitors — to “fill in the blanks” of their visual cognition with whatever comes quickest to mind. What is good about the image and its placement is that Mitt’s disdainful expression is looking directly at the phrase “Barack Obama has failed America.” This is excellent use of visual cueing to direct the visitor to information and actions you want them to respond to. However and in tis case, some of this is going to be lost due to the visual cognition effort indicated above.

What is Mitt Romney Really Communicating? – Every politician wants the public to believe they are the best for the job and can get things done.

However, no individual can achieve anything in elected office unless they believe certain things about themselves because without those core, personal and identifying beliefs they will not have the intellectual power, the charisma, the social awareness and sensitivity, the negotiation skills or the creativity necessary for success in public office.

In this case, Mitt Romney:

As noted in the above analysis, there is belief and knowledge but it is hindered by unsurety. Note the “convinced” paired with “does not believe they will be able to act”.

• Has an idea of where their town/city/county/state/country needs to be but doesn’t know if they’re instrumental in making that vision a reality.
• Has a sense of destiny for both themselves and the own/city/county/state/country and believes they are the only individual who can make it happen.
• Is convinced they know how to improve the current situation.
  • But does not believe they will be able to act upon it.
• They are paying close attention/are sensitive to public opinion.
• Is strongly targeting the youth vote/younger voters.
  • But not strongly enough to stand out/win/be recognized as leading the pack.

It may benefit Mitt Romney’s campaign to get some “true believers” on his web and information design teams. If this site is designed and crafted by true believers then Mitt has some problems to deal with in his camp.

Regarding the real author of this material:

• They don’t think this candidate has a real chance of winning the race.
• They don’t think any amount of fact-checking will be good.