What they voted for was the fresh faced young well spoken and positive guy(s) over the grumpy old cantankerous defensive guy. Policies were completely irrelevant and hardly mentioned in favour of procedural mud slinging and image conscious posing.

But that's the way visual media works now, nothing of substance.. it's all about personalities and conflict, nothing that can't fit into 15 seconds of video is reportable. I've gotten completely fed up with TV in general these days when even in shows about technology and science they have to bring some kind of spurious competition in let alone go into the more interesting technical details.