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Time‘s Amy Sullivan writes up what happened in a focus group of 50 undecided voters — “slightly more female (58%), mostly middle-aged, dominated by former Bush voters, and split evenly along partisan lines” — that Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg convened last night in Denver. A Greenberg focus group for the first debate had closely predicted what the polls would later show; this time . . .

The voters awarded Obama the "win" (38% to 30%, with the rest choosing no clear winner). But that result was actually the least useful of the evening. Because while the earlier debate did not result in any net change in support for the two candidates, Obama walked away with a clear lead in new voters tonight. After the debate ended, 26% of the audience had become McCain supporters while 42% said they planned to vote for Obama. Only a quarter of the group was still undecided.

Even more dramatic was the shift in the voters’ personal reactions to the two candidates. Before the debate, McCain had a 48/46 favorability rating; that improved to 56/36 by the end. But that’s about where Obama started the evening–54/36. After an hour and a half, Obama’s favorability numbers were 80/14. As Joe Biden would say, let me repeat that: 80% of the undecided voters had favorable views of Obama and only 14% saw him negatively for a net rating of +66. Not even Bill Clinton got such a warm response in town hall formats. …

Overall, McCain’s goals for the evening were to make Obama seem like a risky–perhaps even unpatriotic–figure, to paint him as a liberal extremist, and to pin him down on taxes. From the reactions of these undecided Denver voters, none of those efforts worked. Greenberg’s assessment of the evening is a partisan one, but a plausible explanation for the lop-sided response. "McCain is just not wearing well with intense exposure," he says. "But Obama wears very well."

Emphases mine. More details at the link, including the surprise that, over the 90 minutes, this group apparently came to see Obama as more hawkish on getting bin Laden than McCain (which also decreased the number finding him “too liberal”). Stark news for the GOP, but I guess they’ll just have to get used to such.