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Vice President Kamala Harris steamrolled former President Donald Trump in their first debate Tuesday evening, according to polling and results of panels of undecided voters viewing the debate.
A CNN poll of debate watchers found that 63 percent thought Harris won. Going into the debate, that group of respondents were evenly split, 50-50, on which candidate they felt would ultimately win.
Interestingly, the results were an exact flip from the initial Trump-Joe Biden debate in June. Those results, and the accompanying public sentiment, were considered so disastrous that Biden ultimately decided he couldn’t win the race.
That does not appear to be the case for Trump, who spent the hours after the debate roaming around the media area telling reporters that he won. At one point, he began rattling off polling figures he claimed his team was “hearing,” showing him winning by “90, 88, 70, 71 percent.”
Where those numbers came from – if anywhere at all – is unclear. Because CNN’s poll and the panels of undecided voters, along with a number of rightwing and right-leaning pundits, clearly believed that Harris was more convincing, more presidential, had better plans and articulated her vision for America better.
Among CNN’s panel of undecided voters from Pennsylvania, eight believed Harris won. Just three felt Trump won, with a fourth who said she was likely to vote for him because she was always likely to vote for him after doing so in both 2016 and 2020.
The results were repeated over and over among similar panels put together by TV news stations in other swing states. Harris dominated Trump among those panels.
But perhaps the most telling opinions came from those who are admittedly rightwing voters. On Fox News, for example, pundit after pundit, including Brit Hume, Bret Baier, Jesse Watters and others, called Harris the clear winner and questioned Trump’s preparation and his discipline.
Watters called it “a rough night.” Hume said it was “a good night for Harris,” and noted that Trump continued to “take the bait from Harris.” Baier called Harris the “more prepared” candidate and also noted that Trump couldn’t seem to help walking into “the traps” set by Harris.
It was not hard to figure out the flashpoints of the debate. Social media trending topics centered around Trump’s false comments about immigrants eating people’s pets and on his “concept of plan” for health care. Also, the topic of abortion clearly defined the two candidates, and Harris scored well.
“Make no mistake about it – Trump had a bad night,” Hume said. “My sense is she came out of this in pretty good shape. For tonight at least, this was pretty much her night.”
