Shortly after the candidates' friendly handshake concluding Monday night's debate at Lynn University in Florida, we polled our readers on Facebook to tell us one word that summed up each of the candidates' performances.
We then made a list of the responses in each of our threads and created two word clouds that demonstrate the most-mentioned words by relative size (the bigger the word, the more it was posted in the thread).
Of the 1,385 submitted one-word reactions to President Obama's performance 171 of them were "presidential." Of the remaining 88 percent of words, the most common were "commanding" and "strong."
"Presidential" was also the most common word submitted in review of Mitt Romney's performance (his No. 1 word in the previous two word clouds was "liar"). However there were only 65 submissions of the word out of 1,455 responses—only 4 percent to Obama's 12 percent. The next largest words are more negative, including "weak," "sweaty," "clueless," and "liar."
Did you miss your chance to take part on Facebook? Try your hand at it in the comments and answer this question: what's one word that sums up Mitt Romney's performance in the final debate, and one word that sums up Obama’s performance?