Battleground Virginia: Is Mitt Romney's debate showing a game-changer? (+video)

“I got the chance to ask the president questions that people across the country have wanted to ask him, such as why is it that he pushed ‘Obamacare’ at a time when we had 23 million people out of work,” Romney said.

“I asked, you know: Why is it that the middle class is still buried in this country? Why is it we have 23 million people out of work? Why is it half of our kids coming out of college can't find good jobs? Why is it that 1 out of 6 people have fallen into poverty?” he continued.

Romney’s debate performance may even reverberate in the state’s ultracompetitive Senate race between two former governors, Tim Kaine (D) and Mr. Allen. Several recent polls had shown both Obama and Kaine opening up wider leaders on their Republican competitors.

Bob Holsworth, a longtime analyst of Virginia politics, believes Romney put an end to the GOP’s polling doldrums in the commonwealth on Wednesday night.

“You’ve had a lot of these polls in the last week or two showing Kaine had a lead – and that evaporated last night,” Mr. Holsworth said. Romney “at least halted [declining poll numbers] last night, and my guess is that he turned it around some. That was very good news for Allen – his slide is likely to be stopped, as well.”

Two wavering voters who chose Obama in 2008 but don’t have strong ties to either party – the exact kind of voter Romney needs to win to overtake the president – said Thursday they thought Romney had a strong performance, but neither has decided for whom to pull the lever for come Nov. 6.

Sandra Swartz, who works in the state education system, said she’s concerned about cuts to education budgets and, while she likes what she knows about the president’s health-care reform law, she’s unclear on all its implications.

Jason Bryant is in a similar mode. He asked several questions of Susan Allen, wife of Senate candidate Allen, when Mrs. Allen dropped by his office, a small research laboratory, in Mt. Jackson, Va., on Thursday afternoon.

Mr. Bryant watched the presidential debate with his wife and was struck by the candidates' fundamental disagreement over what seemed to him like unarguable facts: Does Mitt Romney want a $5 trillion tax cut or not, he wondered.

“Who is actually telling the truth?” Bryant, who lives in Harrisonburg, Va., said.

Both undecided voters say that they aren’t closely following the Senate race and that they aren’t big-time consumers of political news. They agreed on how they’d likely make a final determination: watching the final two debates.

But among the party faithful, there was a nearly unanimous feeling of relief and excitement after watching Romney’s debate peformance.

“That did my heart good to see what went on there,” Mr. Almarode said of the debate. “We’re in this now.”

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