For the moment, it looks like it’s three-for-three for Barack Obama as two post-debate polls say viewers thought Obama won.
First, from CNN:
HEMPSTEAD, New York (CNN) — A majority of debate watchers thought that Sen. Barack Obama won the third and final presidential debate, according to a national poll conducted at the end of the debate.
Fifty-eight percent of debate watchers questioned in the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll said Democrat Obama did the best job in the debate, with 31 percent saying Republican Sen. John McCain performed best.
The poll also suggested that debate watchers’ favorable opinion of Obama rose during the debate, from 63 percent at the start of the debate to 66 percent at the end of the debate. The poll indicates that McCain’s favorables dropped, from 51 percent to 49 percent.
The poll was conducted by telephone with 620 adult Americans who watched the debate. The audience for this debate appears to be a bit more Democratic than the U.S. population as a whole. Forty percent of debate watchers in the poll were Democrats and 30 percent Republicans. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
And, also, CBS:
As in the previous debates, CBS News and Knowledge Networks have conducted a nationally representative poll of uncommitted voters to get their immediate reaction to tonight’s presidential debate.
In the first presidential debate, second presidential debate and vice presidential debate, more uncommitted voters said the Democratic candidate was the victor.
And tonight’s results have, by a wide margin, made it a clean sweep. Here are the final results of the survey of 638 uncommitted voters:
Fifty-three percent of the uncommitted voters surveyed identified Democratic nominee Barack Obama as the winner of tonight’s debate. Twenty-two percent said Republican rival John McCain won. Twenty-five percent saw the debate as a draw.
More uncommitted voters trusted Obama than McCain to make the right decisions about health care. Before the debate, sixty-one percent of uncommitted voters said that they trust Obama on the issue; after, sixty-eight percent said so. Twenty-seven percent trusted McCain to manage health care before the debate; thirty percent said so afterwards.
Sixty-four percent think Obama will raise their taxes, while fifty percent think McCain will.
Once again, it’s looking like McCain failed to make the impression he needed to make in order to turn this race around.
