State of the Race – October 6 (Debate Recap)

I want to start this post off with a large disclaimer - while the first president-ial debate was held Wednes-day night, the results of the debate and any impact on polling will not show up until next week due to the lag time of when polls are conducted and when they are reported. With that in mind, let's look at this week's polling. There have been 49 polls done in 23 different states, including 29 polls done in 10 of the 11 battleground states that I've identified previously (PA is the only battleground without new data). With the new polling, here's the current breakdown:

	Safe	Likely	Lean	Total
Obama	179	86	38	303
Romney	131	60	0	191
Tossup				44

If you want to see how I arrived at these categories, I would encourage you to review the first “State of the Race” post I did on August 11 which can be found here. The photo above gives a visual breakdown of which side each states fall on. For a list of which states fall in which categories, I provide the following chart:

	Safe	Likely	Lean
Obama	CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, RI, VT, WA	MI, MN, NM, OH, OR, PA, WI	CO, IA, NV, NH, VA
Romney	AL, AK, AR, GA, ID, KS, KY, LA, MS, ND, OK, SD, TX, UT, WV, WY	AZ, IN, MO, MT, NE, SC, TN
Tossup	FL, NC

Here are the changes from last week: NONE!!

That's right, there have been no changes in where states fall over the past seven days. There are many pundits who have suggested that even before the conventions, the polling in this race was already very rigid and this pointed to an electorate which had already made up its mind. The lack of any movement in the polls from last week to this week seems to support this theory. However, this will get tested as we look at the polls at this time next week to see if Wednesday night's presidential debate dramatically changes the status of the race.

This brings us to the debate itself. It was clear to me that Mitt Romney won the night. He was aggressive and went after the President and critiqued President Obama's record, while the President was not sharp in his responses. While the President did critique Governor Romney's plans, when Romney defended them, the President did not hold him to the specifics of the plan that he has previously laid out. All this made it look like Obama was trying to avoid his opponent and it seemed like he was trying to play things too safe. Afterwards, I used the analogy of basketball when one team has a lead and tries running out the clock while the other employs pressure to try and catch up. As the polls were clearly in the President's favor going into the debate, he just didn't want to do anything that would surrender that lead which resulted in him appearing like he was running out the clock and playing it safe. In the meantime, Governor Romney knew he was behind and employed a full-court press to try and score some points. Whether these strategies work will only be known once we see polling done after the debate.

Even though President Obama did poorly in the debate, I would once again point to the 2004 election as a way to alleviate any fears of the Democrats. As I pointed out last week, in 2004 the first debate set up very similarly as President Bush enjoyed a lead in the polls going into the first debate. However, when he met Senator Kerry in the first debate, it was clear that Kerry won the debate and in fact, President Bush came across as being annoyed that he even had to be there. In other words, I think this continues to feed my theory that this election is 2004 all over again. In that case, Bush had the opportunity to put Kerry away in the first debate and failed. As a result, the election was very close, but President Bush did narrowly win his second term. As I've said since I began doing this analysis, I fully expect this race to get a lot closer, but if I had to guess, I would still lean towards President Obama winning a second term.

How Wednesday night's debate changes the trajectory of this race remains to be seen, but tune in next week to find out if it has.