CNN is at it again. Instead of honest reporting, they have chosen to use a bad polling sample and on top of that made a dishonest conclusion.
CNN reports
Forty-six percent of voters who watched Tuesday night's presidential debate said that the president won the showdown, according to a CNN/ORC International nationwide poll conducted right after Tuesday night's faceoff here at Hofstra University on New York's Long Island. Thirty-nine percent questioned said Republican nominee Mitt Romney did the better job.
46% Obama to 39% Romney? Well, that doesnt seem like a split decision. Maybe their polling sample was flawed.
Obama's seven-point advantage came among a debate audience that was somewhat more Republican than the country as a whole and is within the survey's sampling error
hmm... so Obama was the winner by 7% with an over-sample Republican poll. And margin of error +/- 4.5%.
Maybe there is more in the data that makes this a "split"?
Nearly three quarters of debate watchers felt that Obama performed better than they had expected, with just one in ten saying that the president did worse. Only 37% said that the former Massachusetts governor did a better job in the debate than they had expected, with 28% saying Romney performed worse than they had expected prior to the faceoff, and one in three saying he performed the same as they expected.
To summarize:
Better than expected/worse than expected
obama: 73/10
romney: 37/28
What does CNN Polling Director Keating Holland say?
"That indicates that the sample of debate watchers is about eight points more Republican than polls taken among all Americans throughout 2012, so the debate audience was more Republican than the general public," added Holland. "This poll does not and cannot reflect the views of all Americans. It only represents the views of people who watched the debate."
No.. it doesn't even represent that Keating. It represents your flawed polling data.
But.. really, who cares about their poll. We know who won. We know who was presidential.