Registered voters who watched Tuesday’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump say, 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS.
Prior to the debate, the same voters were evenly split on which candidate would perform more strongly, with 50% saying Harris would do so and 50% that Trump would.
The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in, and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public. Debate watchers in the poll were 6 points likelier to be Republican-aligned than Democratic-aligned, making for an audience that’s about 4 percentage points more GOP-leaning than all registered voters nationally.
But the results mark a shift from June, when voters who tuned in for the debate between Trump and Joe Biden said, 67% to 33%, that Trump outperformed his Democratic rival. In 2020 and 2016, Biden and Hillary Clinton were seen by debate watchers as outperforming Trump across the presidential debates.
Methodology:
The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 605 registered US voters who said they watched the debate Tuesday, and the poll findings are representative of the views of debate watchers only.
Respondents were recruited to participate before the debate and were selected via a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques.
Results for the full sample of debate watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.
CNN