Hillary haters and Bernie boosters will undoubtedly chalk the information in this article up to a media conspiracy or some other kind of shady deal. But the fact is, Hillary got a good bump from the debates. And the national polls (not the snap polls and internet focus groups) say that she won the debate. This doesn't fit the narrative that she's a weak, faulty, or wounded candidate so everyone won't like it. But facts is facts.
Hillary’s Debate Spoils: A Sizable Bump in the National Polls
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/20/hillary_clinton_won_the_debate_scientific_polls_show.html
The numbers back up the assessment that I (and many other analysts) offered immediately following last week’s debate: Hillary Clinton won. Sanders supporters, though, disagreed (um, let’s say) passionately. They pointed to a string of unscientific online polls conducted by Slate and other media outlets that showed their man as the runaway winner. More than a few Bernie fans used those results to suggest that any reporter who thought otherwise must be on the Clinton payroll. As I explained at the time, though,
those informal surveys—which let passionate respondents vote more than once and benefit grassroots campaigns like Bernie’s—don’t tell us nearly as much as the surveys conducted by professional pollsters who take steps to find a representative sample of respondents.
The good news for Clinton, meanwhile, extends beyond her debate performance: The polls conducted in the wake of the last week’s showdown suggest that she’s now better positioned than she was heading into the event. The WaPo/ABC poll shows she has the support of 54 percent of Democratic voters—up 12 points from where she was in the same poll early last month.
