1st Leaders Debate

Here's a thread for discussion of the debate, please try to contribute in the spirit of the comments policy and not robotically say how rubbish the other leaders are (and once the debate is finished, keep your judgements to this thread and leave the threads on the post debate polling for discussion of the actually polling!)

Following the debate we'll have at least three polls trying to call the winner. YouGov will be polling a sample drawn from their panel of people who were going to watch the debate, ComRes are doing similar with a panel of 15,000 people they've recruited, from which they will contact 1000 people using automated telephone calls. Angus Reid are also doing some sort of instant reaction which I assume will be much the same.

I'll offer three caveats up front about these polls. Firstly, if they have voting intention it won't be representative, I expect the debate will have very high viewing figures, but not all the population will so a sample made up entirely of people who watched the debate will not be representative of the whole. The best you can hope for is a sample broadly representative of people who watched the debate (even if they included non-viewers, there is no such thing as a nationally representative sample of people that is wholly made up of people willing to do a survey at 10 o'clock at night)

Secondly, the instant reaction won't necessarily be the same as the longer term reaction. That will depend on what narrative comes out of it in the media. To give an example, in the 1976 Presidential debate instant reaction polls apparently showed that the public thought Gerald Ford had won. Only in the hours and days afterwards did attention focus upon his gaffe over Soviet (non)-domination of Eastern Europe, meaning in longer term the debate was a victory for Jimmy Carter.

Thirdly, the leader who "wins" in terms of those instant reaction polls won't necessarily be the one who benefits in the polls. My expectation is still that, barring a hideous gaffe, a truly atrocious performance or an inspirational barnstormer by Cameron or Brown, the leader most likely to benefit in the polls will be Nick Clegg, through the extra publicity and being placed on a equal footing to the other two leaders. That doesn't necessarily mean the instant reaction polls will show a Clegg victory.

UPDATE: That's it, all over! We should have proper figures from ComRes, YouGov and Angus Reid in fifteen, twenty minutes or so. In the meantime, try and be patient and resist the lure of the voodoo polls on the TV websites, they really are worthless and probably tell you a lot more about the audience of the particular website and the enthusiasm of party activists. I should also thank the majority of people for sticking to the spirit of the comments policy - with a few notable exceptions people have made sensible comments about the debate, rather the robot statements that the side they dislike are doing really rubbish.

UPDATE2: I take it back, after behaving well during the debate, there's a torrent of partisan crap since then, oh well. It includes many examples of the classic "the polls must all be wrong because they show people disagree with me". Idiots.