Who won Monday night's debate?
An informal survey of NBC 5 viewers voted 1,047 to 409 that President Barack Obama prevailed in the final meeting.
They weren't the only ones. A CNN/ORC International poll of 448 registered voters named Obama the winner over former Gov. Mitt Romney, 48 percent to 40 percent. That's quite a switch from the first round, when polls crowned Romney supreme over a performance by Obama that some classified as lackluster.
"You know what we saw in this debate, we saw that Mitt Romney's ready to be a great president," running mate Paul Ryan told Savannah Guthrie Tuesday on the Today Show. "We saw a man with a command of the facts and the kind of temperament and demeanor that makes for a great president. We saw a man with a vision for foreign policy."
Vice President Joe Biden told Matt Lauer he saw something different.
"He's a decent man, but he demonstrated an overwhelming lack of understanding in the international community, he demonstrated a lack of understanding in the military," Biden said of Romney.
As for how Monday's match will affect voters' final decision, half of the responders in CNN's poll said the foreign policy debate won't change how they plan to vote on Election Day. That goes for some in Chicago, where the post-debate response was strongly in favor of Obama winning the debate -- at least for those who weren't watching the Bears game.
"I thought Obama clearly won," said one morning jogger. "He pretty much schooled Romney on foreign policy."
Though this debate wasn't quite as energized as the last, it didn't lack barbs from both sides.
Romney criticized Obama for apologizing for the country, something Obama denied, and called the president weak in overseas affairs. "Unfortunately, nowhere in the world is America's influence greater today than it was four years ago,” he said.
Obama shot back by painting Romney as in over his head. "I know you haven't been in a position to actually execute foreign policy, but every time you've offered an opinion, you've been wrong," Obama said.
The clear frontrunner in the social realm following the debate was "horses and bayonets," a phrase used by Obama after Romney criticized him for not providing the U.S. Navy with enough ships.
"Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed," Obama responded. "We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines."
Both campaigns pounced on the phrase. Romney's camp bought and promoted the Tweet for the hashtag, and the Obama campaign did the same thing for the search term "bayonets."
