How Connolly is leading Humphreys in 'battle of the airwaves'

James Cox

Catherine Connolly has been "more effective in balancing the positive and negative stories" than her presidential rival Heather Humphreys, according to a researcher monitoring the candidates' radio performance.

Catherine Connolly leads Heather Humphreys in every qualifying county head-to-head on local radio, with the tightest margins in Dublin (+6.3 pp) and Limerick (+5.9 pp) according to PR intelligence platform Everhaze, which released its latest report in its ‘Battle of the Airwaves’ series.

The report which tracked 4,021 radio mentions of the candidates from September 25th to October 10th shows that in overall volume, despite dropping out of the campaign, Jim Gavin remains the dominant voice on air, capturing 50.1 per cent of all radio mentions (2,013 of 4,021) across 60 stations and show.

In an interview with BreakingNews.ie, Everhaze chief executive James McCann said: "Jim Gavin's withdrawal took the oxygen out of the room for the other two candidates.

"Now as we're into the final week of the campaign what we're starting to see is Catherine Connolly still has a massive advantage when it comes to share of voice and overall sentiment.

"Connolly is having an easier time getting her message across over controversies as opposed to Heather Humphreys."

Mr McCann said the "stickability" of each controversy is a huge factor.

"A story will emerge in newspapers before being picked up in national radio, you'll often get a sense as to how damaging the controversy is if it's picked up on local radio stations.

"Probably the most impactful controversy Catherine Connolly was involved in was in relation to her Hamas comments a couple of weeks ago that have not resurfaced, but in terms of net negative sentiment that was her worst.

"The Syria stuff is back in the news cycle after the picture of her with the military leader linked to Assad, but it hasn't had the legs of other stories.

"Overall it is about a quarter of the negative sentiment from the Hamas comments."

Mr McCann said Ms Connolly's popularity among young people was evident, citing mentions of her rollerblading skills on Cork's RedFM.

Returning to 'stickability', he pointed to how the rent story derailed Jim Gavin's campaign.

"It's a blance of fine margins between Connolly and Humphreys but I think Connolly is more effective in balancing the positive and negative stories.

"In the last week with Gavin's withdrawal, Connolly's campaign had a net increase of 400 mentions, Humphreys had a net increase of 200 mentions."

He also said the Irish Times Ipsos poll which showed a sizeable lead for Ms Connolly had become "a negative in itself" for Ms Humphreys as it was picked up by local radio stations.

"Then Paul Murphy suing her over comments, the Shane O'Farrell case. It's kind of death by a thousands cuts, there's no counter positive narrative in a lot of cases.

"A lot of her positives are around Northern Ireland, and unity, but they're not getting the same traction as Connolly's positives.

"Housing comes up quite a lot, it's probably a net negative but not overly damaging for Humphreys, the stories on government record aren't damaging her too much.

"The Shane O'Farrell case has resonated badly for her, the polling data is one of the high impact negative stories for her, as were Ivan Yates' comments last week."