Who won the first 2008 Presidential Debate? Do polls show Barack Obama or John McCain?
One day after the first presidential debate in 2008, opinion polls as to who won are mixed. Many polls show Barack Obama coming out on top, while others indicate the John McCain stole the show.
Below is a collection of various polls that I’ve tracked down. If you find any others, post them in the comment section.
The Drudge Report is running a poll that indicates, after over 300,000 votes, that a whopping 68% of respondents believe that John McCain won the debate.

A poll at CNN.com, on the other hand, shows that 51% of people thought that Obama won, while only 38% considered McCain the winner. However, CNN does admit that their sample was probably biased.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey is not a measurement of the views of all Americans, since only people who watched the debate were questioned and the audience included more Democrats than Republicans.
Fifty-one percent of those polled thought Obama did the better job in Friday night’s debate, while 38 percent said John McCain did better.
An MSNBC poll with over 800,000 responses shows that 52 considered Obama the winner of the first debate:

The this article entitled “The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won”.
The presidential campaigns roared out of here Saturday morning in a pitched fight to make the case that the other candidate had lost the first presidential debate of the general election.
At the crack of dawn, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign released a new advertisement criticizing Senator John McCain for failing to utter the words “middle class” in the 90-minute debate, held Friday at the University of Mississippi here. By then, Mr. McCain had already produced and released an Internet video citing several instances in which Mr. Obama had said he agreed with his rival’s positions.
Got any other interesting polls results? Put them in the comments.

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