Its the last debate, so I’m keeping up the tradition of the quick poll round up. Here’s what I’ve got so that you can check the latest yourself (or vote). See the links. I’ll be updating periodically.

UDPATE: This morning (Oct 16), a regular poll

Fifty-eight percent of debate watchers questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll said Democratic candidate Obama did the best job in the debate, with 31 percent saying Republican Sen. John McCain performed best.

The poll also suggests that debate watchers’ favorable opinion of Obama rose slightly during the debate, from 63 percent at the start to 66 percent at the end. The poll indicates that McCain’s favorables dropped slightly, from 51 percent to 49 percent.

NOTE: see my other posts on previous polls and their comments for notes about poll accuracy, bias, perhaps even deceit.

Personal attacks have become increasingly sharp in the U. S. presidential election. The McCain campaign has even reportedly decided to make character attacks on Senator Obama a primary strategy. Just recently, Telegraph reported,

A former McCain strategist familiar with the senator’s tactical discussions told The Sunday Telegraph that he would pursue the “nuclear option” targeting Mr Obama personally in the final month leading up to November’s vote.

This strategic turn has resulted in Governor Sarah Palin making a big fuss about Senator Obama’s casual encounters with former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. In response, Senator Obama’s campaign has been reminding Americans about Senator McCain’s participation in the Keating Five scandal. Certainly, the punch-counterpunch will continue as we approach the election, but does negative campaigning like this work?

It depends. Sometimes, negative campaigning works effectively, particularly when the allegations are largely true. But other times, the attacks can make the attacker seem petty and weak. For example, during last night’s second presidential debate, voter’s reactions to both candidates dipped when the candidate made an attack.

Nearly every time one candidate threw a jab at the other, the voter reaction dipped measurably.

The dips were minor for small digs but slipped further if a candidate continued criticizing his opponent.

SenseUs, a firm that does polling about emotional reactions, recently did study of two anti-Obama ads and two anti-McCain ads. They found that,

Of the four negative ads (two Anti-McCain and two Anti-Obama) examined, the only one to significantly better the standing of the sponsor was an Obama ad which challenged and disproved McCain’s assessment that the country is better off than it was eight years ago.

I can’t wait for the official polls, so I like to troll the sites watching the quick polls. Here’s what I’ve got so that you can check the latest yourself (or vote). See the links. I’ll be updating periodically.

*UPDATE 10/8/08: The actual WSJ poll has been removed from the page it was on. For a while just after the debate the poll was radically for McCain but then switched to favor Obama. Comments to the poll suggest there might have been tampering, and that would make sense as in the last two debates (prez and VP) the poll seemed to track CNN’s poll.

A CNN poll of 675 debate watchers found, “64 percent had a favorable opinion of Obama after the debate, an increase of four points from his pre-debate showing.”

NOTE: I know a lot of you believe the polls from various organizations are biased or even mischievously manipulated. I’m not endorsing any one poll, but I do believe that about the best guess you can get of how the viewers judged the debates is from large numbers of responses, hopefully accurately collected from a random sample. So I’m compiling here the polls from any site, conservative or liberal, that I find. Pundits, focus groups, person-on-the-street interviews, straw polls of debate watching groups are all basically meaningless as far as how the debate was really received.

WSJ Interactive Polls

Speaking of polls, this interactive chart on The Wall Street Journal is cool. You can see the trajectory of many different polls over time with key moments in the campaign overlayed on the chart. You can go nationally or state by state. I also like that by putting your cursor over a node you can see how many people were involved in the poll.

Click on the link above, and then when you see the electoral map, scroll down to the graphic shown at right on this page. Click that. Its beyond me why there isn’t an easier way to link directly to it, but I tried a bunch of things and they didn’t work.

UPDATE: WSJ gives an interesting discussion on why the polls might be wrong or at least off.

It’s pretty unlikely now, but a “Clinton-Clark campaign” would have had a nice ring to it and a powerful punch. As retired four-star General Wesley Clark himself comments at a recent Clinton campaign rall, Mrs. Clinton can bring the economic understanding that is sorely needed right now. And of course, General Clark himself brings the military and foreign policy experience. 

Cooler By the Lake gives a nice summary of the possible vice-presidential options by candidate, noting that Wesley Clark might be a likely pick if Hillary Clinton were the Democratic candidate. But wouldn’t he also be a good pick for Obama? Mr. George Sand on Arkansas Politics raised this idea quite a while back, and Bernie Quigley recently discussed a similar idea on his blog, noting that Clark has been an prolific and articulate in his opposition to the Iraq War.

Admittedly, I’ve been a Clark fan since before his 2004 presidential bid. In fact, I was one of those who called for him to join the race 2004, so I’m biased. But, my reasoning is that not only does he have comprehensive ideas for how the Iraq War needs to be resolved, his perscepective is well grounded in his experience as Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO during the Kosovo War. As he discussed in his book, Waging Modern War, many of his activities were diplomatic. So he has both the military and political experience in reasonably similar situations.

The current state with most politicians is to cast the options as a choice between immediate withdrawal or staying indefinitely. Both of these are ridiculous oversimplifications intended to create a wedge issue for Republicans and Democrats. In reality, it is a complex situation that needs a well thought out, sophisticated, mulitpronged response. General Clark has called for a comprehensive approach intended to establish a stable democracy. For example, from a speech last summer,

The military’s part of the solution. It’s not the answer. The answer’s the politics. The politics inside Iraq are not just people who are afraid. It’s not just a group of people who say, ‘Gee, if I just, if I could just let my kids go to school, I wouldn’t have to join a militia.’ Maybe there’s some of that, but there’s a lot more than that going on. This is a power struggle within religious factions. It’s a power struggle between religious factions. And it’s a geo-strategic struggle between different nations in the region–All playing out on the ground in forms of violence, intimidation, blackmail, corruption, payoffs, influence, healthcare, coaching, counseling, there’s no telling how many different intelligence agencies and means of action and influence from different nations are present in Iraq. It’s a whole lot more then the number of nations participating in our coalition.

Unfortunately for an Obama-Clark ticket, Clark has also been critical of Obama. Still, although he might not be a long-time friend of Obama’s, he could bring a powerful antidote to what is doubtlessly going to dog Obama—McCain’s widely accepted better understanding of the military.

There is a lot of talk lately about conservatives being angry at McCain, and there are certainly many articles and blogs out there that are critical of McCain. But it seems to me that “anger” at McCain is kind of a misnomer, or at least only a symptom of the underlying issue.

By definition, conservatives are “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.” Although there are several different conservative factions that emphasize different issues, the general conservative agenda typically involves such things as the following:

• Conservative judicial appointments
• A ban on federal funding for stem-cell research
• A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage
• Tax reduction and smaller government
• More emphasis on free markets
  
• More tax cuts
• Private accounts as part of Social Security
• Oil exploration in Alaska, to ease dependence on foreign oil
• Military build up and vigorousness abroad
• Advocating the needs of business, often at the expense of the environment
• Advocating school curriculum that doesn’t teach evolution or also teaches creationism

A number of these items are likely to suffer if McCain becomes President. So isn’t it really the case that the anger is more about the loss of power than about McCain himself? By that, I mean that McCain’s views have long known, well before the primaries. So what has he done “wrong” that merits anger? McCain is just the personification of that threat.

Columnist Charles Krautheimer argues that Bush should be blamed, because Bush’s policies set the stage for McCain by establishing a “compassionate” variant of conservativism. Without excusing Bush, I doubt that is the reason. For one, the “Bush improved security argument” doesn’t really hold up. Rather, it seems more likely that, despite the purist grievances against him, Bush is largely viewed by the rest of the country as a conservative, and thus his failures also represent failures of conservatism.  (For a poignant perspective of how many people probably feel, see the Implied Observer.)  What we are seeing is the reaction to the perceived failings of conservatism, both within and without the Republican party. And then we are seeing the reactions of conservatives to change, which they are by nature against.