Overall, 47% of the 515 registered voters surveyed said Kerry won, while 45% said the edge went to Bush.
Among registered voters who watched Friday night’s debate, 44 percent called John Kerry the winner, 41 percent said President Bush won and 13 percent called it a tie.
Bush benefited not from a good performance, but from simply being better than last week. Measured alone, I suspect the numbers would have been far stronger in Kerry’s favor.
The trick will be to see how these polls change after post-debate analysis has set in. Last week, immediately after the debate, polls showed Kerry having won the debate by a comfortable margin. By this week, the same question showed Kerry having won by a ridiculously large margin, after people heard more about Bush’s poor performance.
Chances are, the St. Louis debate won’t have quite the same trend, but we’ll see.