Post-Debate:

CNN poll said Biden wins 51 to 36 percent among people who watched.

CBS NEWS/KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS POLL
(Uncommitted Voters who watched the debate)

46% of uncommitted voters who watched the debate tonight thought Joe Biden was the winner. 21% thought Sarah Palin won, 33% thought it was a draw… 98% after the debate saw [Biden] as knowledgeable (79% before the debate).

More:

Uncommitted voters who watched the vice presidential debate thought Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden did the best job by a margin of more than two to one, according to a CBS News/Knowledge Networks poll taken immediately following the debate.

However, there was good news in the poll for Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, too. Palin's debate performance improved uncommitted voters' perceptions of her overall, and on a number of specific measures. But uncommitted voters still have doubts about her ability to assume the presidency if necessary and she lags behind Biden on her knowledge and preparedness for the job.

More from Nate Silver; and Harold Meyerson:

Biden, meanwhile, was having the night of his life. In fact, he did two
things that Barack Obama didn’t do nearly as well in the first
presidential debate last week. First, he put the middle class at the
center of his case for the Democratic ticket and delineated a
pro-middle-class economics quite distinct from the Republicans’
trickle-down. Second, he relentlessly attacked John McCain’s voting
record, and linked it to the policies of the Bush administration.
Biden, we should remember, is a scrappy lawyer with working-class
roots, and he came across Thursday night as a more effective,
plausible, nuanced but no-nonsense populist tribune than the Democrats
have had in years. Given the current zeitgeist, he was just what the
Democrats needed. Serious times need serious leaders, and Biden was
surely that.

Palin was the kid from the sticks who was still standing when it was
done. The nation, I think, was grateful for that. If she had gotten
deeply flummoxed, as she had been during the Couric interview, it would
have caused embarrassed cringing in America’s living rooms. Instead,
her performance was a marvel of its kind -- dissociated, jumbled, at
times completely contradictory (“you build up infrastructure and rein
in government spending,” she prescribed at one point: Huh?), with
soundbites appearing and reappearing almost at random, but fast, happy,
almost joyous: Made it through that five-minute question that I know
nothing about without even pausing: Phew!

Posted by Laura at October 2, 2008 10:55 PM