Not just among voters either, but we'll get to that shortly. First off, Frank Luntz and CNN competed with the Washington Post to conduct focus-group testing on last night's VP debate, claiming to have balanced their samples and focused on undecided swing-state voters to get their reaction to the debate, and its influence on their voting decision.

Let's start with the Post's group of 23 voters, only two of whom were ostensibly uncommitted entirely. Nine leaned toward Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, while 12 leaned toward Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. By the end of the debate, the numbers only changed slightly to nine and 13, respectively, as Vance won the only real convert among them. But they overwhelmingly agreed that Vance won the debate itself, 14-8:

They thought Vance performed better, regardless of how they plan to vote in November. ...

Among the 12 voters who leaned toward former President Donald Trump and Vance before the debate, five said they would “definitely” vote for Trump afterward. Seven said they would still probably vote for Trump.

And among the nine voters who leaned toward Vice President Kamala Harris and Walz before the debate, six said they would definitely support Harris after the debate. Two said they would probably vote for Harris. One switched to probably backing Trump.

Finally, among the two voters who were undecided before the debate, one said they would probably vote for Harris and one said they would vote for a third-party candidate.

Frank Luntz got a more dramatic result. After assembling fourteen voters together for his focus group for CNN, Luntz discovered that only five of them leaned toward Trump and Vance at the start of the evening. By the end, Luntz almost had a unanimous verdict on the debate:

Final focus group vote tonight after the #VPDebate: 12-2 in favor of JD Vance pic.twitter.com/LgahO2za7C

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) October 2, 2024

They had a completely different kind of reaction to CBS News moderators Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan:

However, the focus group is now starting to turn against the moderators. #VPDebate

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) October 2, 2024

One has to wonder whether the moderators did Vance a favor by making their bias clear. Luntz commented that O'Donnell and Brennan needed to "read the room, not their script," and that the interruptions were unwanted. That's important to note, because Luntz's focus group was impressed by the civility between Vance and Walz, strongly implying that the CBS moderators had no reason to interject or cut off the mics. 

CNN didn't spend a lot of time on their focus group this morning, but they did note that the group thought Vance "overwhelmingly" won the debate. Members cited Vance's "steady" performance, "strong control of the facts," and humanizing performance carried the night: 

CNN: "In a post-debate focus group, an overwhelming majority said they thought Vance won last night." pic.twitter.com/F0cjDZ9Vbi

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 2, 2024

Luntz explained further:

“In terms of Vance, they were shocked that the Vance that they’ve seen up to this point was not the JD Vance of last night: measured, thoughtful, emotional, willing to agree with his opponent, not divisive,” said Luntz. “The language that they used to describe him tells me that he has been misused on the campaign so far, that he would be far better communicating Donald Trump’s agenda, and vision, and purpose than the attack dog kind of strategy that they’ve been using up to now.”

“I have to tell you, only twice in my career have I had such an overwhelming movement towards one candidate,” he continued. “That’s how significant yesterday was, not that they were critical about Governor Walz, that they were so shocked at how emotive Senator Vance was.["]

So at least in terms of the debate, Vance won handily with these focus groups, but focus groups are necessarily limited and not necessarily representative. What other measures can we use? Well, we can take a look at the media reactions in the minutes after the debate ended to see how the narratives began to form.

And the Protection Racket Media was not at all pleased last night:

Media reactions after the JD Vance vs. Tim Walz debate.

Geraldo Rivera: JD Vance won the debate.

NBC: Does Tim Walz have a problem with the truth?

Chris Cuomo: JD Vance fact-checked the moderators and he was right.

CNN's John King: Vance carried the important issues.

CNN's… pic.twitter.com/5rICMSivUC

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 2, 2024

Nor were they pleased this morning on MSNBC. The Morning Joe crew wondered aloud how defeat could be spun:

“I was disappointed, I felt like the reasons that Kamala Harris chose Governor Walz didn’t really come out last night,” Jordan said. “The Governor Walz who was joking, who was free flowing in interviews, who was kind of that guy in your hometown who’s a local leader and he’s a lot of fun but he can be serious. I just saw someone trying to be who he wasn’t, and it allowed J.D. Vance to just skate through. It was disappointing too that Governor Walz just didn’t have a better answer for why he had said previously that he was in Tiananmen Square when he wasn’t. You know, something he could have easily said ‘I misspoke, I’m sorry,’ but instead, he almost made it worse.”

“Governor Walz sort of took a pass on what could have been some pretty devastating attacks,” Lemire said. “He didn’t mention the weird issue, he never brought up childless cat ladies, just never came up. He didn’t talk about Ukraine, where Vance has made clear he has no interest in supporting Kyiv. He only brought Project 2025 once, and that’s an issue that’s been so effective for Democrats.”

Mika Brzezinski's comment about Walz winning the day through spin efforts is quite telling. This panel obviously thought he failed in this segment, but still held out hope that media narratives and social-media memes could pull victory from the jaws of defeat. What does that say about the mainstream media these days? Why would anyone root for a dishonest outcome?

At the very least, this all demonstrates just how badly Vance outclassed Walz last night. And since that's the last impression voters will have of these candidates in an adversarial appearance before casting a vote, one can understand the panic they demonstrated.