A slew of polls have come out after Friday’s first debate between presidential candidates Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain indicating most people felt Obama “won” the debate. The latest has been one of the most anticipated: the USA Today/Gallup poll — which also has found more viewers felt Obama did better than McCain:
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.
Most polls also found that reaction to the debate was predictable: the bulk of Democratic partisans overwhelmingly felt Obama won, and the bulk of Republican partisans overwhelming felt McCain won.
[NOTE: An earlier version due to a mind-blank typo — it exists — said Republican partisans overwhelmingly thought Obama won. Obviously not true. We’ve fixed the error. TMV regrets the error.]
The big battle in 2008, however, will be in who captures the independent voters and in that demographic most polls found that more independent voters gave the debate to Obama than to McCain.
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.
The debate transcript is here.
Still, this and other polls need to be taken with big grain of salt.
There is still a month left for a game-changer that could “tilt” poll numbers and the election. The full impact of the debate is not yet seen in some key polls (tomorrow’s Gallup poll will be the first Gallup poll to reflect debate impact). And the Vice Presidential candidates have yet to debate — a debate that won’t be a game-changer but still offers room for two candidates prone to gaffes to make statements that become big news cycle stories. There are growing concerns in the GOP about Sarah Palin while Democrats try to raise expectations about Palin as a debater.
Also: the prevailing wisdom that Obama triumphed is now questioned by two prominent commentators, who are posing some questions.
The Washington Post’s David Broder suggests that McCain came across as the tough Alpha Male and Obama as the younger deferential challenger who played defense and deference:
There were no knockout blows in the first presidential debate of the fall, but John McCain outpointed Barack Obama often enough to encourage his followers that he can somehow overcome the odds and deny the Democrats the victory that has seemed to be in store for them.
It was a small thing, but I counted six times that Obama said that McCain was “absolutely right” about a point he had made. No McCain sentences began with a similar acknowledgment of his opponent’s wisdom, even though the two agreed on Iran, Russia and the U.S. financial crisis far more than they disagreed.
That suggests an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator — an impression reinforced by Obama’s frequent glances in McCain’s direction and McCain’s studied indifference to his rival.
Whether viewers caught the verbal and body-language signs that Obama seemed to accept McCain as the alpha male on the stage in Mississippi, I do not know.
But it reinforced my impression that McCain was the more aggressive debater. He flung the adjectives that stick in a listener’s mind, calling Obama “naive” and therefore “dangerous.”
NBC’s Chuck Todd (who is morphing into someone to listen as carefully to as Tim Russert deserved full attention) also sees McCain’s tough stance as potentially having planted seeds that could blossom on Election Day:
1) Did a majority of folks see two presidential level candidates on stage? This is an especially important question for Obama. I suspect that only the most partisan McCain supporters wouldn’t say Obama looked as presidential as McCain. In fact, McCain may have helped the audience come to that conclusion when he attempted to make the case directly that Obama wasn’t ready.
2) Did McCain look like someone ready to buck the status quo? It’s hard to argue that he wasn’t showing himself as someone wanting to shake things up. For every time Obama attempted to link McCain to Bush, the Arizona senator had no qualms going after his own party. In fact, Obama’s “John is right” mantras were usually connected to one of McCain’s anti-Republican establishment points.
3) Did the viewers get turned off by McCain’s sometimes dismissive treatment of Obama or will they start asking themselves the same questions? While this was a very heavy and substantive debate, I do wonder if on style, McCain lost a point or two, and that may explain why he’s not staying even in some of these insta-polls.
McCain was planting a key seed: “Yes, we want to get the Republicans out, but can we trust that guy and isn’t that other guy not a typical Republican?” The race may hinge on who can convince voters that they are most to be trusted.
UPDATE: Ron Brownstein, who used to be my favorate LA Times columnist and who is now director of Atlantic Political Media gives his analysis on Marc Ambinder’s site.
Read it in full but here are some key highlights. He watched with some independent or loosely-committed voters in Denver:
On balance, it didn’t seem like the debate moved them much; several of them (including some former George W. Bush voters) came in tilting at least slightly toward Obama and left that way. Those who were the most truly on the fence said it didn’t really provide them any help in climbing off in one direction or the other.
I agreed with the group that the debate failed to produce a clear story line that would lastingly change voters’ opinions. But I did think it benefited McCain in one respect. The fundamental tug of war in this election is the competition between Obama and McCain to frame the choice in the minds of swing voters. McCain wants them to view their choice largely in personal terms-to ask themselves: which of these two men has the experience, background and instincts I want in a president? Obama wants voters to view the choice less in personal than generic terms-he wants voters to ask which of these two men offers a direction for the country that I support. McCain Friday night was more successful than Obama at steering the discussion back to the terrain that favored him.
The larger point is that nothing that happened last night is likely to be much remembered in November-or probably even in October. Mostly, the debate showed that these are both plausible presidents-though with very different priorities, styles and strengths which appeal to very different groups of voters. Neither stumbled; neither soared. I’ve been wrong about the public reaction to debates too many times before to predict what (if any) near-term movement in the polls this will produce. But I will make one prediction: whatever short-term movement this debate provokes will be superseded by the reaction to the remaining debates-and to other events within and outside of the campaigns’ control that have yet to occur.
Indeed, it’s clear that both candidates’ camps will be painstakingly going through the video of the first debate studying the other candidate’s responses and style and seeing how to use it against that candidate next time. Each will prepare “zingers” they hope will become immortalized and widely disseminated in sound bites. Both will try to come up with a strategy to manipulate or provoke the other into a damaging response or image in the next debates.
But the biggest factor will be unforeseen events and how both candidates react to them. And both camps will be scrambling to win the independent voters. Brownstein writes:
To repeat: the more swing voters see this election primarily as a choice between two individuals, the better for McCain; the more they see it as a choice between two directions (at a time when about 80% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track), the better for Obama. Once the debate turned to foreign policy, it revolved more around the two men’s personal qualifications and judgment than whether the country was better off (either at home or abroad) after eight years of President Bush and whether McCain really offers a shift in direction. In that sense, the encounter probably tilted toward McCain, even if the instant polls generally bent toward Obama. I’m guessing that despite those polls Obama’s camp is thinking that he needs to more aggressively try to steer the discussion toward his strongest ground in the next debate-and maybe not deferentially agree with John McCain quite so often.
There’s more, so read it in its entirety.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.