A new USA Today/Gallup poll seems to reinforce the idea that Barack Obama came out of Friday’s debate looking pretty good to those who watched:
A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows 46% of people who watched Friday night’s presidential debate say Democrat Barack Obama did a better job than Republican John McCain; 34% said McCain did better.
Obama scored even better — 52%-35% — when debate-watchers were asked which candidate offered the best proposals for change to solve the country’s problems.
More than six in 10 people or 63% in the one-day poll, taken Saturday, said they watched the first faceoff in Oxford, Miss. For those 701 people, the margin of error was +/- 4 percentage points.
The poll suggested the debate was to some extent a wash for McCain: 21% of those who watched say it gave them a more favorable view of him, 21% say less favorable and 56% say it didn’t change their opinion much.
Three in 10 said their opinion of Obama became more favorable after seeing the debate, compared to 14% who said less favorable and 54% who said it didn’t make much difference.
More than one-third of viewers, or 37%, said they had less confidence in McCain to fix economic problems after seeing the debate; 23% said more. For Obama, the survey results were 34% more confidence, 26% less.
Neither candidate broke away on national security and foreign policy. About a third of viewers said they had more confidence in each man on that front after the debate, and slightly less in each case said they had less confidence.
This could mean that we’ll start seeing a sea change in the polls over the next several days, with Obama pulling further ahead of McCain than he has in the past rather than a return to the retreat-and-advance that we saw in the polls through most of the summer.
H/T: The Moderate Voice
