Saturday, September 27, 2008

Okay, I Guess I Was WAY Off

It seems most polls suggest that Obama was the clear winner in last night's debate.
Here's Nate from FiveThirtyEight:
Specifically, by a 62-32 margin, voters thought that Obama was “more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you”. This is a gap that has no doubt grown because of the financial crisis of recent days. But it also grew because Obama was actually speaking to middle class voters.
These internals are worse for McCain than the topline results, because they suggest not only that McCain missed one of his few remaining opportunities to close the gap with Barack Obama, but also that he has few places to go. The only category in which McCain rated significantly higher than Obama was on “spent more time attacking his opponent”. McCain won that one by 37 points.
Larison:
Aside from the reliable yes-men at NRO and some of the other large conservative blogs, I am having a hard time finding anyone who thought that McCain did better than stay even with Obama tonight. The idea that McCain won the debate seems not to have crossed the minds of anyone not already deeply committed to stopping Obama, which suggests that McCain’s performance was worse than it might at first appear.
Ross:
If these numbers show up in wider polling, it seems like awfully bad news for McCain. If he can't get a bump from last night's showing, which struck me as a pretty strong, I think it's going to be awfully difficult for him to get a bump of any sort across the run of debates. It's hard to envision him turning in a vastly better performance where the focus is explicitly on domestic policy (if you thought we heard a little too much about earmarks last night, just you wait ...), and of course there's the looming Palin-Biden fiasco for his campaign to weather as well. If undecided voters didn't like what they saw from McCain last night, I don't know what, exactly, his campaign can do - given his range and limitations as a politician, and the obvious weakness of his running mate - to win them over going forward.
CNN:

Fifty-one percent of those polled thought Obama did the better job in Friday night's debate, while 38 percent said John McCain did better.

Men were nearly evenly split between the two candidates, with 46 percent giving the win to McCain and 43 percent to Obama. But women voters tended to give Obama higher marks, with 59 percent calling him the night's winner, while just 31 percent said McCain won.

Halperin (Time Mag):
Obama - Overall: Went for a solid, consistent performance to introduce himself to the country… Two more performances like that and he will be very tough to beat on Election Day.
McCain - Overall: Failed to deliver his “country first versus Obama first” message cleanly, even when offered several opportunities.
Mark Penn:
In the end, Barack Obama seemed far more like Bill Clinton building a bridge to the future, and John McCain was Bob Dole, opening a window to the past. Round one decisively went to Barack Obama.