You can tell because they keep calling it a 'draw'. When they say it's a 'draw', that's Republican Speak for 'we got our butts kicked'.

I also hope that Joe ended the meme that Ryan is "so intelligent". He clearly was in over his head, especially on foreign policy.

and there are NOT 1/3 of the electorate registered as Indies, but the pollsters and media seem to think that they should sample equally with the other two parties. So what they get is more like a poll with 65% conservative, 35% democrats.

I think people keep missing this on the polls lately. Independents are largely republicans and jr. libertarians, and no way 1/3 of the electorate. They should be sampled around 12%, and then.. it should be understood that most of them are conservatives.

better polls would be simply asking if someone is conservative or progressive. lol

60% who thought Ryan would be a better President and 57% who thought Biden did.

strikes again!

In 2008, pundits would declare winners only to have snap polls refute their proclamations. So they're making sure the panels of voters match the chosen narrative this time around.

Part of CNN's "unbiased" reporting is to stack the deck to a draw. And they did that. They knew that a partisan split like that would lead to roughly a tie.

SPECIAL NOTE OF CAUTION #2: The sample of debate-watchers in this poll were 31% Democratic and 33% Republican. That indicates that the sample of debate watchers is about eight points more Republican than an average CNN poll of all Americans, so the respondents were more Republican than the general public.

Seriously, you could have walked into Romney/Ryan campaign hqs and not found 48% who would think Ryan actually won

I need to keep pointing this out, as we had this issue over the last few elections, and polling. The media and pollsters are so obsessed with including 1/3 of the sample as Independents (which are majority CONSERVATIVES.) Plus, the people registered as independent are NOT 1/3 of the voting public. They're just not. The two main parties still dominate. The 1/3-1/3-1/3 obsession the pollsters have now is ALWAYS wrong, and totally skewed conservative, plus oversampling Independents. That's why the polls sucked ass for the last election...