It seems the most recent Presidential Debate didn’t hurt Mitt Romney in the eyes of the nation, according to yesterday’s Gallup poll.

Republicans were angry with the debate’s moderator, Candy Crowley, for seemingly favoring the president by allowing him more time to speak and then daring to interject when Romney falsely accused him of never calling the attacks on the American Consulate in Libya a “terrorist act”. Fearing that the outcome would be a slide in Romney’s favorable numbers from the first debate, his supporters took to various social media outlets to voice their displeasure.

However, Gallup polls are showing that Romney has a lead over Obama at 52% to 45%. Interestingly, a different Gallup poll shows that Obama has a 50% approval rating when it comes to job approval.

But as Nate Silver of The New York Times points out, Gallup hasn’t been consistent in its predictions and is often way off the mark. A snapshot of the nation’s voting preferences doesn’t necessarily mean much when it comes to actual numbers, and Obama, according to other polling sites, still holds his lead in important states like Wisconsin, Nevada, and Ohio.

“On average since Oct. 1, the Gallup national tracking poll has accounted for 12 percent of the information that the model uses to calculate the trend line,” says Silver. “The other daily tracking polls, collectively, have accounted for 24 percent of the data, and the occasionally published national polls for 19 percent. Finally, the state polls account for about 45 percent of the data used to calculate the trend-line adjustment. Thus, even though the Gallup national tracking poll is more influential than any other individual poll series in the FiveThirtyEight trend-line calculation, it still accounts for only about 12 percent of it. It can very easily be outweighed by the other polls if they are in disagreement with it.”

(image)
Images: New York Times