It will be a few days yet before we get a large amount of post-debate data to sift through, but we can glean some information now and make a few predictions for the direction of the presidential race.
The daily tracking polls aggregate data from the last few days, so they tend to be slow to react to new information. Still, they gather new data every day, so each of them has responses from after Monday night's final presidential debate.
Their raw results are less helpful in predicting where public sentiment is headed, but we can look at their trends.
Obama gained a point in the Gallup poll today, but lost ground in both the Rasmussen poll and the IBD/TIPP poll.
However, due to its methodology, the Rasmussen poll tends to skew slightly conservative.
It's not so much that Obama or Romney is losing or gaining among particular voters. More likely, in a close race like this one, the poll are regressing towards the mean and more accurately reflecting the tie in the race.
However, a CBS News instant poll of undecided voters taken right after the debate showed a huge margin saying Obama won, 53 percent to 23 percent. More respondents said the debate was a tie--24 percent--than thought Romney won.
While that poll only asked who won the debate, not who the respondent was going to vote for, with an electorate as partisan as this one, it is undecided voters who will likely determine the outcome.
Republicans may be able to agree that Obama won the final debate, but few of them will switch their allegiance and vote for him. In the same way, no matter how eloquent Romney's defense of a particular policy may have been, few Democrats will be swayed to his side.
So if--and this is a big if--the victory undecided voters say Obama had last night does in fact persuade some of them to vote for him, we should see a slight rise in the polls for Obama.
It won't be large, because the pool of persuadable voters is even smaller than it was during previous debates, and there were fewer viewers.
But with the election so close, especially in the swing states, even a small post-debate bounce for Obama could significantly increase his chances of winning, if not in the popular vote, then certainly in the Electoral College.
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