Time Magazine Grades:

Obama A-
McCain B-

CBS poll of UNDECIDED voters:
40% Obama Won
22% McCain Won
38% Draw

CNN/Opinion Research poll:
51-38 Obama win
52-47 Obama win on Iraq
58-37 Obama win on economy

Those are the only polls I've seen, I'd be curious to know if there are any that favor McCain.  If not, the perception that Obama won the night may harden quickly and become the conventional wisdom.  Seems to me that's usually how these things work.

In fairness, I don't know the make up of these polls and what the demographics are which can obviously influence the results.

They said the same about Kerry right

Well, whoever won, I'm just glad you're staying up late with me Timbow

I think you're right about Kerry with the debates, but wasn't Bush ahead in the polls a bit when they debated the first time?  Could make a difference.

Not that I'm interested in arguing your point, but personally I thought McCain handled himself very well tonight.  I was surprised that the polls were so skewed toward Obama.  Could be that the McCain team has been saying Obama is such an extreme, dangerous dude for all these months lowered expectations.

Diane Sawyer had a one hour show regarding McCain and Obama before the debates.  70% of the time was on Obama and she was fawning over him.  The show was so skewed it was pathetic.

CNN, TIME and CBS been in the tank for O'Bomb since the beginning.

I already voted so, whatever the fuck O,Bomb says don't matter to me any longer!

Bandwidth.

I didn't watch the debate because, having pretty much made up my mind by this time, all watching the debate would do is raise my irritation with the other guy.

unfortunately each source you look at to see who won will spin it to the direction of the candidate that they back. the only opinion as to who won that really matters is yours.

I know it's a right wing blog, but it's probally as authentic as CBS or CNN.

-- Modified on 9/27/2008 8:56:12 AM

CBS and CNN hire independent polling companies to conduct their polls.  Generally the bigger news institutions are not regarded as injecting bias into their polling but you never know about the accuracy of the poll until you see what's known as the "crosstabs" - what percentage of the poll was made up of self-identified democrats, republicans and independents.  

Right now party identification favors democrats in this country, so the polls I referenced will have definitely sampled more democrats than republicans. However, the CBS poll sampled UNDECIDED voters so it's hard for me to see how they were in the tank for Obama.

I would point out that just a few weeks ago CBS ran a poll after the GOP convention that had Obama and McCain tied with a headline blaring that McCain had made up 8 points on Obama.  

CNN has similarly had plenty of polls that favored McCain when he was polling well or that showed Obama slipping.

As far as Time Magazine goes, the grading was done by Mark Halperin so you can judge for yourself whether you think he's in the tank for anyone.

Online polling from ANY source including Drudge or more progressive websites are not considered to have the kind of methodology that leads to accurate results and no one serious references online polling as dispositive.