Romney Leads By 4 In Post-Debate Survey

Hmmm, I thought this story would be creating a huge buzz here on ET, maybe since you didn't paste the story nobody clicked your link.

In the first national poll to be conducted entirely after the opening presidential debate, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney now leads President Barack Obama by 4 points.

The poll, conducted by Pew Research Center from Thursday through Sunday and released on Monday, shows Romney leading Obama among likely voters nationwide, 49 percent to 45 percent. That's a stark contrast from Pew's mid-September poll after both parties' conventions, which showed Obama up 8 points among likely voters.

The dramatic 12-point swing in Pew's poll from Obama to Romney is perhaps the strongest piece of evidence to date that the president has paid a political price for his listless performance in the Denver debate. But the complete suite of post-debate surveys from national pollsters is only beginning to emerge, and the early indications are of a less dramatic shift than what Pew is showing.

Republican-leaning Rasmussen found Romney leading by 2 points in its Saturday release, which was based on findings from the tracking period of Oct. 3-5. But in Rasmussen's Monday poll, conducted entirely after the debate and partially following the release of Friday's encouraging jobs report, the two candidates were tied again. Gallup reported on Monday that Obama and Romney were tied in the three days immediately following the debate, after Obama led by 5 in the three days prior. But on Monday, Gallup's tracking -- which is based on a 7-day rolling average -- showed Obama with a 5-point lead.

The PollTracker Average now shows Romney overtaking Obama to claim a nearly 3-point lead after the president led for the better portion of the last month.



Pew's survey shows voters overwhelmingly believe Romney won the debate: 66 percent said the Republican nominee performed better, compared with only 20 percent who said Obama did a better job. A separate poll released by Gallup on Monday showed that a whopping 72 percent of debate watchers declared Romney the winner, while only 20 percent said the same of Obama -- the largest margin of victory in the history of Gallup's post-debate polling.

Pew's poll also suggests that voters have given Romney a second look following his stellar debate performance. The two candidates now run even on the question of who is the stronger leader, a category that Obama won by 13 points in Pew's September poll. Voters still view the president as the more honest and truthful candidate by a margin of 44 percent to 39 percent, but the president had a 14 point advantage on the same question a month ago. And Obama's 18-point lead with women shown in Pew's previous poll is also gone, with the two candidates now tied among female voters.

In another blow to the Obama campaign, whose central message has been to move the country forward and away from the old policies put forth by Republicans, voters identify Romney as the candidate with new ideas, 47 percent to 40 percent. Moreover, Romney's favorability rating spiked 5 points to 50 percent in Monday's poll. Obama's favorability rating, long his most resilient attribute as a candidate, fell from 55 percent last month to 49 percent.

On a host of policy issues -- the budget deficit, the job situation, taxes, Medicare, health care and foreign policy -- Romney has either expanded his edge from last month, overtaken the president or narrowed Obama's edge.

Take Medicare, for example. The president was widely viewed as the better candidate to handle the nation's health care system for senior citizens in September, 51 percent to 38 percent; today, the president's advantage is only 3 points, 46 percent to 43 percent. Obama's previous 15-point edge on foreign policy is now only a 4-point advantage. On taxes, Obama's 6-point lead from last month has turned into a 4-point advantage for Romney. And a majority of voters have doubts about Obama's ability to take on the paramount issue of the 2012 campaign: 54 percent said the president does not know how to turn around the economy, while 44 percent said he does.

Underlying all of these gains by Romney is a re-engaged Republican Party, whose rank-and-file endured a frustrating month following the national conventions. In Pew's September poll, 73 percent of Romney supporters said they had given "a lot of thought" to the upcoming election; that number swelled to 82 percent in Monday's release. The portion of Obama voters who said the same dipped slightly, from 69 percent in September to 67 percent in the latest poll. Additionally, Romney's supporters appear galvanized in the wake of his head-to-head performance with Obama. Sixty-seven percent of Romney's voters said they are "strongly" supporting the candidate, up from 56 percent a month ago. On this, Obama has neither dipped nor spiked: 68 percent of the president's voters said they are strongly supporting him, unchanged from last month.

Pew conducted its poll Oct. 4-7 using live phone interviews with 1,201 registered voters and 1,112 likely voters nationwide. The margin of error is 3.3 percentage points for registered voters and 3.4 percentage points for likely voters.
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This is not a small event. I don't know if I've ever seen such a huge swing this fast in a poll in any presidential election.
 
Quote from hughb:

Hmmm, I thought this story would be creating a huge buzz here on ET, maybe since you didn't paste the story nobody clicked your link.
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No the problem is I think most of the leftists on this board have me on ignore. If you present them facts contrary to their beliefs they get upset and don't know what to do. They are still holding out hope that Romney screws up or there is some sort of October surprise.
 
Many of us are happy but not too excited because we did not trust the polls the whole time.

We do not know how much of that 12 points is based on the fact the poll changed the slant of its sample and how much is due to the debate bump.

Either way the take away from this and all the other polls is that it all depends on turnout.

Rs are more motivated.
Independents lean Romney... and probably more of them do now.

so Obama wins is if he turns out Ds like he did in 2008.
(which will be difficult since millions have left the party)
 
I had to laugh at the conclusion but Sullivan points out (click on the link to the full article) that Obama has even lost his lead with women and is now getting crushed by independents... which was confirmed by the IBD poll as well.


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Did Obama Just Throw The Entire Election Away?
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/10/did-obama-just-throw-the-entire-election-away.html

...
How can Obama come back? By ensuring people know that Romney was and is a shameless liar and opportunist? That doesn't work for a sitting president. He always needed a clear positive proposal - tax reform, a Grand Bargain on S-B lines - as well as a sterling defense of his admirable record. Bill Clinton did the former for him. Everyone imaginable did what they could for him. And his response? Well, let's look back a bit:

With President Obama holed up in a Nevada resort for debate practice, things can get pretty boring on the White House beat right now. Pretty boring for Obama too, apparently. "Basically they're keeping me indoors all the time," Obama told a supporter on the phone during a visit to a Las Vegas area field office. "It's a drag," he added. "They're making me do my homework."

Too arrogant to take a core campaign responsibility seriously. Too arrogant to give his supporters what they deserve. If he now came out and said he supports Simpson-Bowles in its entirety, it would look desperate, but now that Romney has junked every proposal he ever told his base, and we're in mid-October, it's Obama's only chance on the economy.

Or maybe, just maybe, Obama can regain our trust and confidence somehow in the next debate. Maybe he can begin to give us a positive vision of what he wants to do (amazing that it's October and some of us are still trying to help him, but he cannot). Maybe if Romney can turn this whole campaign around in 90 minutes, Obama can now do the same. But I doubt it. A sitting president does not recover from being obliterated on substance, style and likability in the first debate and get much of a chance to come back. He has, at a critical moment, deeply depressed his base and his supporters and independents are flocking to Romney in droves.

I've never seen a candidate self-destruct for no external reason this late in a campaign before. Gore was better in his first debate - and he threw a solid lead into the trash that night. Even Bush was better in 2004 than Obama last week. Even Reagan's meandering mess in 1984 was better - and he had approaching Alzheimer's to blame.

I'm trying to see a silver lining. But when a president self-immolates on live TV, and his opponent shines with lies and smiles, and a record number of people watch, it's hard to see how a president and his party recover. I'm not giving up. If the lies and propaganda of the last four years work even after Obama had managed to fight back solidly against them to get a clear and solid lead in critical states, then reality-based government is over in this country again. We're back to Bush-Cheney, but more extreme. We have to find a way to avoid that. Much, much more than Obama's vanity is at stake.
 
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