Exactly, which was why Maddow was coming across a bit pitifully to me, before I switched the channel. She was out there saying, now don’t panic guys, Obama may have lost this one but it will be okay. It was too much of an overreaction, and she could have used that time to better effect discussing the actual substance of the debate.
GALLUP: Obama Gains A Point On Mitt Romney After The Debate, Leads 50-45
Romney gains after debate … with Republicans (Obama with independents)
"Obama’s favorables are unchanged from before and after the debate, 56-44. But looking at the crosstabs, Obama stayed solid with Democrats, gained a tiny bit with Republicans, and … kicked ass among independents. Seriously, flipping his faves among independents from 46-54 to 54-46, a 16-point shift, is a pretty big deal.
"Now look at Romney’s favorables. He definitely improved, from 46-54 to 51-49. He desperately needs those numbers to improve (and improve further) if he wants to be competitive. So, good news, right?
“Well, Romney improved marginally with Democrats and stayed even with independents. So where did he improve? Among Republicans, where his “very favorable” jumped a solid 10 points, from 36 to 46 percent.”
Shayna, none of that surprises me at all. Glad to see confirmation that I’m not a wackaloon because my reading of the debate deviates from the SDMB majority.
Well even doing better with republicans is good for Romney, they didn’t like him much either.
You may well be correct in the face of contrary conventional wisdom, but I wouldn’t base that affirmation on a single poll result.
When we’re talking about changes of single digits, a single poll just isn’t very helpful because we expect polls to vary by a few points regardless of what happened in the outside world because of statistical sampling error.
Let’s give it a couple days so we can sort through the statistical noise. I think what we’ll probably see is a 1-3 point bump for Romney. Which is very significant in a close race (though not enough for him to win yet), but just can’t be teased out until we can weed out the noise.
The election is really all about turnout. The real danger to Obama supporters in terms of Romney’s supposedly having “won” the debate is that the likely Republican voters will feel better about the candidate, thereby reducing the possibility of skipping the election, voting for a third party, or defecting to Obama.
None of that will matter if independents vote overwhelmingly for Obama.
Yes, but are these Republicans in the swing states? Or are they in states that were bound to go red regardless of well Romney did.
If we assume that swing states proportionally contain more independents than non-swing states, and Obama is outpacing Romney among that crowd, then it doesn’t really matter if Romney is starting to excite his party. He should have been exciting them months ago; now is a bit late for all of that.
I’ve seen claims that polls (unreliable at this point, of course) show a 6 point gain for Romney overall over several states, enough to make Romney the winner in several.
Question is (related to the above question), where is that new support coming from? And is that new support the kind that endures? Some (even some despairing liberals) argue that the optics for Romney on Wednesday were so good that those people have made up their mind and will not hear any arguments about his lying afterwards, so those votes are as good as his. Others, of course, disagree. A lot of it does depend what kind of voters make up that bounce.
When in doubt, go for Nate Silver:
I dunno… Everyone was pointing out Romney’s lies and Obama’s poor performance. I like that she attempted to put the whole thing in a historical perspective, something nobody else seemed to be doing at all, even if her methodology might have been imperfect.
Too bad you turned off the channel because she showed the video of Andrea Mitchell becoming visibly shocked after Romney mouthpiece/fat piece of fuck John Sununu called Obama “Lazy.”
She showed this right after replaying the recent Newt Gingrich clip where that other fat piece of fuck said “I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while or watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythm is, but this is a guy that is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may very well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, he happens to be a partial, part-time president.”
Rhythm, performer, basketball, needs large amounts of rest and lazy… All they left out was watermelon and fried chicken… :rolleyes:
I actually heard the Sununu clip while in the other room. If it’s all the same to you, I won’t bother clicking on your link to it. It’s Friday night, and I don’t need the image of that moron in my head to start off the weekend.
During the debate, the most powerful man in the world politely tolerated the vapid bleatings of a petulant whiner.
By some measures, Romney won the debate. Perhaps by his demeanor. But, Obama clearly won on substance (and tolerance).
Crane
Indeed. That’s not looking too likely, though, and most independents aren’t really independent at all: they have quite reliable voting patterns, typically.
We’ll just have to wait and see how the polls turn out in the swing states in the next few days. My guess is that any bounce for Romney won’t be nearly enough.
I agree with all of this.
fact checkers, 4 of 6 Romney bad, 2 of 6 tie
I’ve been following politics and debate long enough that I know you guys need to calm down and not worry so much. Every political season, pundits and the political junkies like us freak out every time the polls move or some event happens to change the race. We always think the current snapshot in time is going to carry forward to the election.
Remember 2008? After Palin gave that speech at the RNC that wowed everyone, McCain’s poll numbers went up. And conservatives started dancing around claiming they had it sewn up. Then Palin started getting hit/exposed, and McCain’s numbers took a dive. Conservatives were dispirited. Then Palin debated Biden to a close debate (conservatives think she won, liberals thought she lost), after expectations for her were extremely low. Suddenly it was a ‘whole new race’. Then, McCain ‘suspended his campaign’ during the crash, making him look like a crazy old coot, and his poll numbers dived again.
Listening to the pundits can drive you crazy, because the nature of their job means they have to amp up the drama. Who wants to listen to people say, “Hey, the election is a month away. The poll s will probably move back and forth a few times before we go to vote. Happens every year. Who knows who will win?”
But that’s the fact. You can go back in time and take a snapshot of any given day a month out from the election and find all sorts of examples of people who were ahead but still lost. As I recall, Reagan was behind Carter by something like 8 points around this time. I think Bush I was losing to Dukakis, too.
The time to panic is after the second Presidential debate. We’ll have had the VP debate by then, and Romney will have to show that his first performance was not a fluke. If Obama stomps him in that debate, Romney’s performance in the first one will be completely forgotten (as will Ryan’s, whether or not be beats Biden).
So if you guys honestly believe that Obama is smarter and better at this than Romney, you’ve got nothing to worry about. This is just a blip that will be corrected.
It doesn’t matter how smart Obama is, or how smart Romney is, what matters is how smart we are.
On Wednesday night I thought that Romney “won” the debate, but now I’m not so sure. It’s a couple days later and the only moment from the debate that I’m still really hearing people talk about is when Romney said he’d get rid of PBS. A lot of people love PBS, and its funding is a tiny drop in the bucket, so his argument made no sense. If anything from the debate has any legs, it is this.
That’s my impression, also. I prefer to wait a few days and see what the lasting impression is made by big events. RNC- Clint Eastwood and the empty chair, DNC- Bill Clinton killing it. Presidential debate- Big bird.
I’ve seen so many Big Bird holding “Will Work For Food” jokes, it’s not funny (well, actually, it still is..)
The worst thing that can come out of a presidential campaign, let alone a presidential debate is a godforsaken meme.