Poll: An Obama comeback, but a Romney edge on debates

• USA TODAY poll shows Obama easily winning the third presidential debate
• But Romney edges him when voters assess the impact of the three debates overall
• More Americans report watching or listening to the debates than in 2008

WASHINGTON --

President Obama was the runaway winner of the presidential debate on foreign policy this week, a nationwide USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds. But Republican rival Mitt Romney edges him when voters assess which candidate did a better job in their three debates overall.

The survey shows Obama staging a dramatic comeback after a disastrous start. He trailed Romney by 52 percentage points when Americans were asked who did a better job at the first debate in Denver, then was seen as besting his opponent by 13 points in the town-hall-style debate on New York's Long Island.

In the third debate, held Monday in Florida, Obama was judged the winner by 23 points, 56%-33%. Even 16% of Republicans credited him with doing the better job. However, when Americans were asked to think more broadly about the three debates as a whole, Romney scored a narrow advantage, 46%-44%, as having won. That 2-point edge is within the poll's margin of error.

"What we find in our research is that debates don't work in a cumulative fashion in a sense of adding up the pluses and minuses per candidate per debate," says University of Missouri professor Mitchell McKinney, who studies political communication. "On several levels, the first debate really has the greatest effect; it's the first impression. That's the first time we see them together, and we size them up in terms of comparison shopping."

Obama managed to do damage control by replacing a disengaged manner in the first debate for a much more confrontational one in the forums that followed, McKinney says, but the initial encounter had a more powerful impact on voters' opinions.

More Americans tuned into the presidential debates than four years ago.

Nearly seven in 10, 69%, say they watched or listened to the third debate. Even more, 76%, saw or heard the second debate; 67% tuned in to the first one. In 2008, when Obama debated Republican John McCain, between 63% and 66% said they had watched or listened.

In the new poll, just over 1,000 adults were surveyed in the two days following each debate. The margin of error is +/-4 points.