Voters don’t seem to care who won Tuesday night’s presidential debate, a Trafalgar Group snap poll taken after the debate in key swing suggests.
While voters largely agreed that the Democrat candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, won the debate, the change in their voting plans was statistically insignificant, the survey of likely general election voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found.
By a 13-point margin, more voters said Harris won the debate (55.3%-42.5%), while 2.2% thought it was a tie.
Before the debate, and then afterwards, voters were asked whether they planned to vote for Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, Vice President Harris or another candidate.
Before the debate, more voters said they planned to vote for Trump, by a 47.4%-46.8% margin.
After the debate, even more voters said they planned to vote for Trump, but his lead shrank (48.2%-47.9%).
As a result, Trump’s lead over Harris shrank by 0.6 percentage points – well within the survey’s 2.1% margin of error at the 95% confidence level.
Trump was able to increase his percentage of votes, even though his margin decreased, because of a decline in the percentages of swing state voters who said they were undecided or planned to vote for a candidate other than Trump or Harris.
Thus, the post-survey results suggest that most voters are steadfastly entrenched in their preference of candidates and that those who abandoned the Other/Undecided cohort went to either Trump or Harris in roughly the same percentages reflected in the pre-debate survey.