What happened to Carly Fiorina's presidential campaign?
What鈥檚 happened to Carly Fiorina鈥檚 presidential campaign? She was supposed to be a Republican rising star, propelled upward by her crisp dissection of Donald Trump in the last GOP debate. But her latest poll numbers, at first glance, look awful.
Over the past month, she鈥檚 dropped from 9 to 5 percent in , for instance. She鈥檚 gone from 11 to 7 percent .
Worst of all, she鈥檚 cratered in , plummeting from 15 percent in mid-September to 4 percent today.
Meanwhile, her fellow nonpolitical outsiders, Mr. Trump and Ben Carson, have stabilized in the polls and even crept upward. All this has caused some pundits to declare that Ms. Fiorina鈥檚 campaign is kaput.
鈥淐arly Fiorina鈥檚 moment in the spotlight seems to have already passed,鈥� .
Well, that might be right. Fiorina may be following the classic path of a little-known candidate, as a cycle of discovery, scrutiny, and decline.
First, voters are excited to stumble upon a new face they like. Think Herman Cain in 2012. That person rises quickly in the polls, while the news media scramble to discover all they can about the individual. They print and broadcast this, and not all of it is flattering. Disappointed voters then move on, looking for their next political crush.
This template might explain Fiorina鈥檚 drop. Following her debate performance on Sept. 16, she rose from a blip in the polls to about 12 percent in the of major surveys. The rise was rapid 鈥� voters obviously responded to her verbal dexterity and air of stage command.
Then the scrutiny phase began. And for Fiorina, this meant lots of stories about her tenure as head of Hewlett-Packard, during which the iconic firm lost half its market value, and she fired more than 30,000 workers.
Fiorina insists that she was shaking up a firm otherwise destined to fail. But most voters didn鈥檛 know about her CEO history, and they may have backed away from her regardless.
Fiorina was also caught up in a discussion about abortion at the time of her debate rise. Her passionate criticism of Planned Parenthood thrilled many conservative voters. But Democrats and some fact-checkers questioned whether her description of a video that alleged abuses on the part of the group was accurate.
For Fiorina, the problem might not have been this controversy per se, but the fact that it chewed up time and attention she might better have spent on other things.
鈥淚nstead of using her moment in the spotlight to discuss a range of issues and further introduce herself to voters, she ... trained her focus on Planned Parenthood,鈥� .
But here鈥檚 the bottom line: The 鈥渄ecline鈥� part of the new candidate cycle does not have to be permanent. Some hopefuls survive the scrutiny phase, take some lumps, and then rise again. That鈥檚 the nature of a campaign.
More debates are coming. Fiorina might profit by that exposure. And this time, she鈥檚 got plenty of money to capitalize on any bump: She raised almost $7 million during the third quarter of 2015, a substantial improvement over her previous inflow.
She鈥檚 now got about . Trump might need to practice his debate skills. For the time being, Fiorina isn鈥檛 going anywhere.
