Mitt Romney’s post-debate bounce could be short-lived: Polling experts

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Nate Silver of The New York Times in his ‘FiveThirtyEight’ blog acknowledges Romney’s very strong performance, but said that his own forecasting model gives Romney just over a 21 percent chance of winning the electoral vote. “[S]ome changes may be real, but short-lived,” Silver wrote in his blog. “It seems quite possible that Mr. Romney would have had at least an even-money chance of winning an election conducted on Thursday exactly, when his polling was very strong, but there was apparently less strength in his numbers on Saturday,” he added. A Gallup Poll found that before the debate, Obama had a five-point lead over Romney.

In the three days of interviews conducted after the debate, the two candidates were tied, each having support of 47 percent of registered voters. "The first presidential debate went decidedly in Romney's favor," Gallup wrote in its poll analysis. "The debate appears to have affected voters to some degree, given the narrowing of the race in the three days after the debate compared with the three days prior," it added However, the analysis later noted that: “Still, the impact was not so strong that it changed the race to the point where Romney emerged as the leader among registered voters. Rather, at least in the first three days of Gallup tracking after the debate, the race is tied."