UK Election: commentary on the second Prime Ministerial debate

Five different polling organisations rushed out instant polls on the winner of last night's leaders' debate on Sky News. It's very noticeable that newspapers favouring the Conservatives before hand have trumpeted Cameron as the "winner". This does seem to be very selective reading of what passes as "facts" in this case. Three out of five polls had Clegg in the lead, and the average of the five was:

Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat) 33.4%
David Cameron (Conservative) 32.8%
Gordon Brown (Labour) 27.6%

So Cameron, the man who would be Prime Minister and who was lauded to the heavens just a few weeks ago, has managed to haul himself up from last to second, on the basis of less than a third of those responding. Which isn't very impressive.

What is very interesting is the self-selecting poll on Facebook, which presumably is somewhat skewed towards younger people. At the time of writing, over 60,000 people had responded, with the totals:

Clegg 48%
Cameron 27%
Brown 25%

In effect, voting starts next week BEFORE the final debate on BBC, as postal votes are expected to start arriving on people's doormats. In my own constituency the Liberal Democrats seem to have been fighting for those postal votes (a legacy of a previous referendum, with a high degree of take up) by blitzing voters with literature. Very little is evident from the other Parties, implying no steam or they are waiting to go fro a late push. Which might be too late if many people have voted and the recent surge in support for the Liberal Democrats is cemented.