Second Debate: Behind the Post-Debate Numbers

Last night, John McCain and Barack Obama met in Nashville for the second of their three debates, the "town hall" debate. A poll taken immediately after the debate by CBS and Knowledge Networks shows that undecided voters believe Obama "won" the debate, with 40% saying Obama did better and 26% saying McCain did. That, of course, was the one-liner that folks got about CBS's research effort.

But reading the poll results themselves was, to me, enlightening. CBS did before-and-after questions of 516 undecided voters. One question was whether the voters thought Obama "would make the right decisions about the economy." Before the debate, 55% thought Obama would make the rights decisions; afterwards, that number climbed to 68% -- 20 points higher than McCain's post-debate number.

On the question whether "he understand voters' needs and problems," the Obama-McCain contrast numbers soared from 59%-33% pre-debate to 80%-44% post-debate. Think of that bottom line: almost twice as many undecided voters think Obama "gets" them as think McCain does.

The McCain attack since this summer has been the Barack Obama is "not one of us" -- that he's exotic and unusual; inexperienced and unprepared. These numbers show that the McCain meme is not working.