MSNBC.com hosted a poll on the candidates in the 2007-05-03 Republican debate. The poll allowed a person to give a '-', '0', or '+' to each candidate before or after the debate. I've complied their data into a more readable form. The original data is provided in images at the bottom.

CandidateBefore - %After - %
Before 0 %After 0 %
Before + %After + %
Brownback4946
4145
109
Gilmore4943
4751
46
Giuliani3439
2534
4127
Huckabee4237
4449
1414
Hunter4743
4649
78
McCain4042
2338
3120
Paul4729
4439
932
Romney4135
3135
2830
Tancredo4845
4246
109
Thompson4645
4347
118

As you can see, the debate had a major effect on public opnion of some of the candidates. Here's the ranking of the candidates by approval (positive% + zero%) before and after the debate (with the amount of change):

Before
1Giuliani66
2Romney59
3Huckabee58
4McCain54
4Thompson54
4Paul54
7Hunter53
7Tancredo52
9Brownback51
9Gilmore51
After
1Paul71+17
2Romney65+6
3Huckabee63+5
4Giuliani61-5
5McCain58+4
6Gilmore57+6
6Hunter57+4
8Tancredo55+3
8Thompson55+1
10Brownback54+3

What's interesting to me are how Giuliani and Paul moved. Giuliani is the ONLY candidate who's approval rating decreased due to the debate; all of the other candidates were considered more acceptable after getting their messages out during the debate. Paul jumped up by a huge amount, which shows that his ideas resonated with people once they knew what they were.

Another interesting thing to look at is just the positive before and after rankings:

Before
1Giuliani41
2McCain31
3Romney28
4Huckabee14
5Thompson11
6Tancredo10
6Brownback10
8Paul9
9Hunter7
10Gilmore4
After
1Paul32+23
2Romney30+2
3Giuliani27-14
4McCain20-11
5Huckabee14+0
6Tancredo9-1
6Brownback9-1
8Thompson8-3
8Hunter8+1
10Gilmore6+2

Giuliani and McCain have been getting the most press, but when their unfiltered message got out though the debate answers, opinion really dropped. My guess about Paul's huge rise has to do with his getting little to no press before the debate.

There is another debate coming up on May 15th, so we'll see how the numbers change again (assuming I can get similar data to look at)

Original Data

Images captured at 1623 MDT 2007-05-04:

Before the debate data:

After the debate data:

Source data is copyright 2007 MSNBC.com.

Analysis is copyright 2007 Jarrod Lombardo
Analysis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License