After Wednesday night's presidential debate, CNN declared "we have a horse race on our hands," implying that Mitt Romney's unexpectedly good performance catapulted him back into contention.
But will the first debate, or any of them, have a measurable impact on the outcome of November's election? History says it's unlikely, but not impossible.
The media and the public agree that Romney won on Wednesday, but in such a close election, with such a divided electorate, most voters have already made up their minds. While reasonable supporters of President Obama can admit that he did not perform as well as Mitt Romney in their first bout, few, if any, will switch their allegiance because of a few softball questions fielded from behind a podium.
So the debates need to target undecided voters. But anyone who will actually get off the couch to vote and is still undecided at this late point in the election cycle hasn't been paying attention. And there's little the campaigns can do to get them to start paying attention now, so the target audience for the debates usually aren't the ones watching them.
Since the first televised debate in 1960, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, only two debates have seen one candidate leap ahead of the other afterward: Reagan overtaking Carter in 1980, and George W. Bush edging out Al Gore in 2000.
In the first instance, Reagan won by a landslide, and likely would have anyway, even without the debate. In the second, Bush actually lost the popular vote, and the election was fought all the way to the Supreme Court.
If debates have any real impact on the outcomes of the elections, it is very small. Even polls, which right now say Mitt Romney won the debate hands down, rarely move post-debate when viewers are asked who they'll vote for. Challengers usually pick up a few points from undecided voters who they've convinced, but support for incumbents rarely budges.
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