Ipsos Public Affairs Daily Tracking Poll - October 4, 2012

One of our favorite trolls over at Ace of Spades tried to use this poll last night as evidence that Romney's stellar debate performance is having no effect, because this poll is still showing Obama with a 5 point post debate lead.

I love it when trolls hand you the sword with which you will evicerate them.

First of all, this poll is not used in the RCP average, so I won't be including it in my average.  I find it interesting that they state up front that they adjusted the results to account for age, ethnicity, and gender, but not for partisan identification.  It violates my cardinal rule, it doesn't provide partisan ID breakdown of the poll.  I don't know what the D/R/I is, so I can't normalize the results. 

However, it has some interesting nuggets inside.

Let's start with favorability.  This gives us a hint at what the demographics of the poll probably are.  Both before and after the debate Obama has a 56/44 favorability split.  This is very high for him, indicating that this is probably a sample that has 40%+ Democrats.  Notice that this number didn't budge based on the debate.  Romney however started with a 46/54 favorability split.  After the debate that number changes to a 51/49 split.  That is a 5% shift based on the debate alone.  He is also drawing over 50% favorability in a heavy Democrat sample.

Next let's look at whether or not the debate changed the views of the candidates.  Among all registered voters Obama lost 2% in this metric.  16% said they are more positive toward him, while 18% said more negative toward him.  Romney on the other hand gained 8% here.  27% said they were more positive, while 19% said more negative.  Interestingly 48% of Republicans are more positive toward Romney in this survey, showing that his performance played very well with the base.  An important subsample here is Independents.  Romney gained a net 8 points with them, while a huge 25% of them answered "Don't Know" (unlike the 43% "didn't change") to this question.  They are still processing, and are going to be influenced by the post debate analysis.

On specific issues, these are Romney's net gains:

Healthcare +5%
War on Terror +6%
Iran +7%
US Economy +9%
Immigration +10%
Social Security +8%
Medicare +10%
Taxes +9%
Gay Marriage +1%
Jobs +10%
Deficit +6%

Note that several of these topics weren't even discussed, giving evidence of Ace's point that once you favor a candidate, you favor them on all issues.

Finally, the "who are you going to vote for" question.

Before the debate Obama leads 48-39
After the debate Obama leads 48-43

Obama's support doesn't change, but 4 percent of the undecided voters decided to vote for Romney.