Yes, Bernie Won Every Poll on the Internet. Hillary Still Won the Debate.
So, what gives? Were my fellow journalists and I watching a different debate than everyone else?
Let me start with the polls. As I explained after the first GOP debate when there was a similar difference in opinion between the chattering class and online respondents, instant online polls are informal and unscientific. The results rely on a self-selecting group of respondents with no regard to political affiliation, age, country, or even whether the person doing the responding actually watched the debate. Respondents, meanwhile, don’t have even the slightest motivation to be objective; it’s hard to imagine a Hillary supporter casting an online vote for Bernie or vice versa, regardless of what he or she saw onstage. Like tracking new Twitter followers or Google searches, the online surveys provide an interesting snapshot of the mood of a particular slice of the Internet, but they’re mostly for entertainment (for the reader) and traffic (for the outlet). No one should mistake them for the scientific surveys done by professional pollsters.
They also tend to favor those candidates with active and impassioned fans—something that Bernie’s fundraising numbers and campaign crowds suggest he clearly has in spades. When Slate and a number of other established media outlets declared Hillary the winner, we gave that same fan base—which has long felt, not unjustifiably, that their man’s not getting a fair shake in the media—one more reason to reload the page and vote again. In online polls, like elections, it’s all about turnout. In online polls, unlike elections, you can vote as many times as you want.
Which brings us to what I saw on Tuesday: As I wrote then and still believe now, Hillary was confident, poised, and unexpectedly aggressive. That, I concede, is a subjective opinion—as is any that calls a “winner” in a contest where there is no agreed-on metric to actually score the participants. But it’s also an informed one. She entered the night up nearly 20 points on Sanders when pollsters included Joe Biden in the race, and by even more when they didn’t. In other words, she didn’t need to win converts, only to preach to her choir—and from where I was sitting, she did just that. If absolutely nothing else, her email scandal was effectively eliminated as a primary issue thanks to Bernie’s benevolence—a massive pickup given the topic has been by far Clinton’s single biggest vulnerability this year.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/14/bernie_won_polls_not_the_debate_hillary_won_the_debate.html
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