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This is the report on the results of the Citizens' Media Scorecard we organized to Rate the Debate. It is cross-posted at Free Press, which hosted the online survey:

John McCain's supporters seemed happy with the ground rules of the second Presidential debate in Nashville. Barack Obama's supporters seemed happy with the result.

Those are the findings of the third Citizens' Media Scorecard of the Campaign '08 season. An online panel of more than 2500 volunteers was recruited by Free Press to rate the conduct of the town hall style debate by moderator Tom Brokaw, who selected questions from audience members and e-mail submissions. Brokaw's balance of issues received high marks from partisans of both candidates--and their complaints about bias were in perfect balance too.

Republican McCain has long insisted that he prefers the town hall format for political debates. And, according to the panel, his supporters share the candidate's preference. Almost half the McCain partisans (48% v 24% for Barack Obama supporters) judged the town hall format in Nashville to be superior to the moderated format eleven days ago in Mississippi.

By contrast, almost twice as many Obama supporters in the panel chose Jim Lehrer, the Mississippi moderator, over Brokaw (43% for Lehrer v 21%) in a head-to-head comparison. After the Mississippi debate 42% of Obama supporters rated Lehrer's performance as "excellent;" after the Nashville town hall Brokaw received a lower 28% "excellent" rating from Obama's fans.

Nevertheless, despite the format, Obama's supporters were more likely to say their man won in Nashville (92% v 76% in Mississippi) whereas McCain's supporters saw no improvement (84% said he won both). McCain's supporters distinguished between their candidate's performance in the foreign policy sequence of the town hall compared with economic and social policy: 92% said their man won in foreign policy, only 80% and 70% in the latter issues.

Brokaw received high praise for his choice of issues. More than half of each group of supporters (64% of Obama voters, 50% of McCain's) found them "extremely" serious and relevant. Brokaw received a "just right" rating from more than half of the members of both groups on four economic issues—housing, taxes, the financial crisis and federal spending (62%, 62%, 59% and 59%)—and two social issues—energy and healthcare (70% and 74%). He also drew praise as "just right" for his focus on war & peace, terrorism and human rights & genocide (66%, 70% and 65%).

Criticism of Brokaw mostly concerned what he omitted. A majority of both groups complained about Brokaw's lack of questioning on crime and abortion (71% and 70%). Almost all McCain supporters (92%) wanted questions on immigration; almost all Obama supporters (85%) wanted questions on poverty.

There were few complaints about Brokaw's bias towards one candidate or the other. Most of the members of each group of supporters found no favoritism (74% of Obama's, 70% of McCain's); a minority saw evidence of it and--no surprise!--it was almost always against their own man (25% and 26%). In the view of the panel, Brokaw's decision not to fact-check the candidates or challenge their spin was an omission: 83% of Obama supporters and 75% of McCain supporters wanted more of it.

Although Free Press extended outreach to all parts of the political spectrum, of the 2609 volunteers who participated in the scorecard, Obama supporters vastly outnumbered McCain's (2186 v 196), as they have in our two previous panels. To correct for that imbalance, we followed our standard practice of contrasting the ratings of the two groups rather than combining them; otherwise the Republican perspective would have been drowned out. Consisting of volunteers rather than a random sample, these results cannot be projected to the population at large.

The two groups of supporters tended to watch the debate on different outlets. MSNBC (28%) and PBS (22%) were the favorite outlet for Obama partisans. Fox News Channel was the favorite for fully half (50%) of the McCain voters in the panel. These viewing patters have held firm for all three debates to date.

Again, we need to recruit a more diverse panel for the final debate. However there were signs that, already, this second debate was delivering diminishing returns as a voter education exercise. Almost half the volunteers in the panel stated that it taught them nothing new (45% of Obama supporters, 55% of McCain's) about their opponent's views, a steep rise from the "learn nothing" numbers (29% and 37% respectively) in Mississippi.


Andrew Tyndall 10/13/08 2:49:59 pm

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