Tuesday’s second presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, was a bare knuckles brawl. Most pundits say President Barack Obama scored more debating points; American voters, however, do not score these debates by any fixed set of rules. They react to them during and afterward with their individual hearts, minds, and guts; and when the votes are tallied on Election Day, Barack Obama will prove the big loser.

Much of the coverage of the town-hall-style debate is focused on how moderator Candy Crowley conducted it. Her interventions and her mindset favored President Obama; and she wrongly sided with the President about what he said in the Rose Garden the day after the Benghazi attack. This will only bring more focus on the Obama administration’s actions and statements in the two weeks following 9/11/12, which raise questions about the administration’s competence and honesty.

Ms. Crowley’s performance, however, was a sideshow. She’s not on any ballot; and it’s not what any moderator says or does that’s important. It’s how the candidates react to them, however they behave. Barack Obama benefited from the way Crowley managed the debate. Still, he reacted to her and to Gov. Romney petulantly. His discomfort and irritation were palpable.

What’s paramount about the second debate is whether it will stem the momentum Gov. Romney picked up as the result of his first debate performance and the President’s lackluster one; and the answer to that question is not likely.

What’s been at work during the final months before the election is this; despite President Obama’s poor performance in office, a large number of undecided voters who voted for him in 2008 have been reluctant to turn their back on him. They voted for Mr. Obama then because he offered hope and promise and the prospect of calming the racial tension that lingers in American politics.

While President Obama has failed to deliver on hope and promise and on calming racial tension, they still find him likeable and empathetic; and they ask themselves if perhaps the President is right when he says he just needs more time.

Committed liberals and conservatives don’t think that way. They are much more engaged in issues and ideology; and they support the ideas and belief systems the nominees represent as much or more than they do the men. Independent and undecided voters pay a lot less attention to politics until it’s time to decide who they will vote for.

Moreover, many undecided voters secretly fear the consequences of rejecting the first African American President of the United States. They sense that would leave blacks, 95 percent of which support President Obama, embittered. They don’t want their vote to contribute to that. They needed a compelling reason, therefore, to vote for Gov. Romney. Up until the first presidential debate, he had not given them that reason.

In both the first and second debates, Gov. Romney has given most undecided voters what they needed to vote for him. His performance has been solid. He could have handled this question or that question better, but that’s not the point. Those undecided voters who have been reluctant to vote for Romney increasingly are willing to take the necessary leap of faith.

Of course anything can happen between now and Election Day; and there is one more debate on foreign policy at which a reinvigorated President Obama is likely to do well. He will attack Gov. Romney’s lack of foreign-policy experience and tout his success at killing Osama Bin Laden and a long list of al Qaeda leaders. He’ll argue that he has ended the war in Iraq and will end the war in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the President is enormously vulnerable because of how he reacted to the Benghazi attack and the failure of his Middle East policy. The smell of cover up aided and abetted by the indifference of the mainstream media is in the air, but it will be hard for the liberal media to avoid these issues in the final days of the election campaign.

Gov. Romney has an enormous opportunity to put President Obama on the defensive in the final debate. He can force him to explain how he couldn’t have known the truth about Benghazi from the beginning, and he can press Mr. Obama on the deteriorating situation in the Middle East.  

Nevertheless, despite Benghazi and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, this isn’t a foreign policy election. It has been and remains about the U.S. economy and what kind of country we will become when the bills come due. Very few undecided voters will make up their minds because of foreign policy issues.

Unless Gov. Romney delivers a performance like the one President Obama delivered in the first debate, which isn’t likely, the die has been cast. Gov. Romney has met the presidential threshold and he has given undecided voters what they need to vote for him.

Undecided voters overwhelmingly go for the challenger in the final days of election campaigns unless the challenger fails to rise to the occasion, and there is no reason to believe this election will be otherwise.

I said several weeks ago that I believed Mitt Romney would win the election by a comfortable margin. Nothing has happened to change my mind.