After the first presidential debate, we were told that Governor Romney had won--decisively, overwhelmingly, incontrovertibly. That meme was fed, in large part, by the CBS snap poll of roughly 500 uncommitted voters, which found that 46% of respondents scored the debate a win for Mitt Romney, 22% said the President was the winner, and 32% called it a tie. Last night, as has been written about extensively by many on this site, CBS again took a snap poll of roughly 500 uncommitted voters. And in that poll, 53% said Barack Obama won the debate, 23% thought Mitt Romney won, and 22% thought it was a tie.
We need to call that what it is: a 54-point shift.
In the positive feedback loop that is our modern media, the President's performance during the first debate metamorphosized into what was universally derided as the Worst Debate Performance Ever. One would have thought that the President fell to knees, claiming to have ordered the code red, while revealing himself to be the one-armed man who killed Richard Kimball's wife, and also coming clean as the lone gunman on the grassy knoll. It was as though logic and human history defied anyone to conceive of a worse debate performance. And behind all of these pronouncements were the raw data numbers--including the CBS snap poll.
What I have not seen, read, or heard this morning is anything approaching the rhetorical pile-on that was spawned by the last debate. CNN pronounced the debate a tie. Others went so far as to declare Romney the victor. If it feels like the Twilight Zone, that's because it is.
Let's review. We have a 24-point victory for Mitt Romney in the first debate in a poll. We have that poll serving, in no small part, to set the meme of the political discussion for weeks. We then have those same pollsters poll the same quantity of the same demographic, and find a 30-point victory for Barack Obama. In a rational, mathematically based world, that would be called what it is: a 54-point shift. And in a world willing to pronounce a single ill-timed, off-handed remark a "game-changer," numbers like that should be sufficient to set a singular (and well-deserved) narrative of success for the President. I don't know if it's Romnesia, the sort of orienteering that would lead one to overlook the Persian Gulf when searching for a route to the sea from Iran, sheer incompetence, or a fervent desire to have a horse-raise until the last possible moment--but something has prevented us from seeing this shift. It's not just that Obama's victory margin in the third debate is substantially larger than Romney's was in the first debate; it is the juxtaposition of those two that should be all the more remarkable.
Now, I'm not sure what good polls are. I have found the polling this cycle to be generally confounding, and at times counterintuitive, but they are the blunt instruments we have to assess the state of the electoral. So, fine. But if we're going to do that, we have to do it consistently. And a 54-point shift has to be acknowledged. Because even if they don't fit the desired pundit narrative, uncommitted poll respondents are people too, my friend.