Lis Smith, the campaign manager for Buttigieg, whose January appearance on the show Smith credited with helping make him a top-tier presidential candidate, explained that the show’s format “serves as a sort of focus group, with the hosts coming from different professional backgrounds. When Pete was able to win them all over, it helped demonstrate his broad appeal with voters — even those that may disagree with him.”
“If you’re confident in your personality, you can go on there and have good banter with them,” says Chris Christie, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, whose January appearance to hawk his new book was the highest-rated episode of the season so far. “You can be both serious and funny.” He continued, “Now, also, they don’t pull many punches, so if you’re not good on your feet in terms of being able to respond and react quickly and appropriately, it’s a dangerous place to be, because you can be made a fool of pretty quickly, too.”
Hillary Clinton was on the show only once during the last presidential campaign — “a mistake,” Behar told me. Regular appearances, Behar thinks, would have helped voters see a more human side of Clinton. “Her people who kept her away from this show should have been fired,” Behar says. During her interview in April 2016, Clinton discussed her email scandal, Trump and how decades in the public eye forced her to develop a thick skin. (“Anybody who’s interested, I have great creams for it,” she deadpanned.) It wasn’t a goofy interview, like the cringe-worthy clip of her dabbing on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” but it showed a relaxed side of a candidate who was often criticized for being too stiff. On “The View,” Behar says, “Americans saw the lovely person I know — the laughing, happy, gregarious grandma that she is, in addition to being so smart. They didn’t see it on other shows.”
[Read more about Ellen DeGeneres.]
Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, a Democrat who announced that he was running for president on the show, told me that he chose “The View,” in part, because he wanted to reach “Republican women who maybe aren’t enamored with Trump but are still conservative.” He added: “I think if we’re going to win this election, we’ve got to be able to appeal to a lot of the electorate, and you’ve got to be in the room, having those conversations and taking those questions from the Meghan McCains of the world” — a reference to the show’s most vocal conservative host. Christie told me: “It’s a pretty persuadable audience.”
The actual breakdown of the show’s audience suggests that it’s liberal. According to the consumer-intelligence company MRI-Simmons, almost 65 percent of its viewers who are registered to vote are Democrats, and only 12.6 percent are Republicans. But “The View” is removed from the increasingly partisan fray of cable news, which attracts viewers who are political junkies; it offers the tantalizing promise of reaching the unconverted. Julián Castro, who served as secretary of housing and urban development under Obama, appeared on the show shortly after announcing his candidacy for president because he wanted to reach “people that maybe don’t necessarily always follow politics,” noting that “political news channels are one segment only.”
from Best News Viral http://bit.ly/2M3Cjbn
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