Presidential Polls, Debate Polls Barely Give Obama the Edge

Post-debate polls have placed President Obama as the winner of the final presidential debate, but don’t necessarily mean he has the upper hand in the elections.

With the presidential debates creating a battlegrounds on Twitter and other social networking sites, everyone was left asking themselves, “Who won the third debate?”

After the third and final debate, it seems as if the President made a come back compared to his first debate performance.

CBS News, CNN, Public Policy Polling, and Google Consumer Surveys all revealed wins for Obama after he tackled foreign policy issues during Monday’s debate.

Some polls claimed the President as the winner by a landslide, such as the CBS News poll of undecided voters which revealed that over 53 percent of those polled said Obama won the debate while only 23 percent gave it to Romney.

Other polls, such as the CNN poll of registered voters, said that the race is still a close call, giving Obama a mere eight point lead over his Republican competitor.

With only 16 days left until Election Day, all the numbers and stats aren’t really showing a likely winner for this election just yet.

In fact, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday placed both presidential candidates dead even at 47 percent among likely voters.

Voter turn out itself will be a huge factor in the election considering that Romney has the upper hand among likely voters, but President Obama still has the edge among all registered voters. The only question is will all those registered voters make it out to the polls.

The gender of those voters may have a major impact as well, as more polls show that 53 percent of men support Romney while only 43 percent favor Obama.

Women, on the other hand, have their hopes in the president. While 51 percent of women support the President, only 43 percent show support for Mitt Romney.

While the numbers aren’t bringing much comfort to voters, it seems like Obama’s camp is satisfied with the polls so far.

“We fee good about where we are,” senior Obama adviser David Axelrod told NBS’s David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” “You look at early voting that’s going on around the country – it’s very robust and it’s very favorable to us and we think that’s a better indicator than these public polls, which are frankly all over the map.”

A new Reuters’ analysis suggests that the Democratic Party shouldn’t be so comfortable just yet, however.

“Romney’s recent surge in the polls after his strong performance in his first debate with Obama on Oct. 3 has propelled the Republican into the lead or within striking distance in enough states to give him a reasonable chance of beating Obama to the finish line,” the analysis explained.

Although the President was victorious in both the second and third debate, the narrow lead on those wins might not be enough to recover after his poor performance during the very first debate.

After taking all the numbers into consideration and including the percentages for margins of error, polling statistician Nate Silver has predicted a 67.9 percent chance of Obama winning a second term as president.

 

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