What might skew the polls on the third debate.

I've read a number of reports on the polling about who won last night's debate, and I have yet to see one point made that seems important to me: many people planning to vote for Bush--especially Democrats and independents who have decided to vote for him--have based their decision on Iraq and the war on terrorism and therefore felt little need to watch a debate that focused on domestic policy. I watched the debate because I wanted to blog about it and because I'm enough of a politics buff that I wanted to see how the candidates performed, but I was not very interested in the policy wonkery that filled most of the debate. I did not need to hear a debate about domestic policy to help me decide.



When asked who won the debate, as we've seen, people overwhelmingly choose the candidate that they support. That might make you look at a poll that shows Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 37 percent and think, wow, Kerry is gaining a lot of supporters, but another way to look at that is: a lot more people who are or might become Kerry supporters were interested in watching a debate about domestic policy. I'd like to think the professional pollsters have already taken this into account and done some methodology tweaking. Maybe ABC did something different, which would explain why its poll shows the candidates tied.