Frank Luntz's respected focus group polling deemed Marco Rubio the winner of Thursday night's debate, but it was a different story online. While such surveys have a tendency to be highly unscientific and only roughly accurate, they are a great gauge of the general temperature of how a candidate went over. Rather unsurprisingly at this point, Donald Trump was a big hit.
In a Drudge Report survey of more than 120,000 people, 63.8 percent of respondents named Trump the winner. Ted Cruz trailed at 17.9 percent, Marco Rubio at 12.8 percent, John Kasich at 3.6 percent, and why-is-he-still-running Ben Carson came in with 2 percent.
Time magazine, on the other hand, reflected a brutal night for Ted Cruz, with a single-digit percentage of respondents thinking he was a winner. In their online poll of 17,000 people, Trump was declared the winner by 71 percent, Rubio by 18 percent, Kasich by 6 percent, Cruz by 4 percent, and Carson was again the caboose at 2 percent.
Thursday's Republican debate was the last before the Super Tuesday showdown on March 1.