By overwhelming margins, voters in Pennsylvania and Florida were repelled by President Donald Trump’s conduct in the first general election debate, according to New York Times/Siena College surveys, as Joe Biden maintained a lead in the two largest battleground states.
Overall, Biden led by 7 percentage points, 49 per cent to 42 per cent, among likely voters in Pennsylvania. He led by a similar margin, 47-42, among likely voters in Florida.
The surveys began Wednesday, before the early Friday announcement that Trump had contracted the coronavirus. There was modest evidence of a shift in favor of Biden in interviews Friday, including in Arizona, where a Times/Siena survey is in progress, after controlling for the demographic and political characteristics of the respondents.
One day of interviews is not enough to evaluate the consequences of a major political development, and it may be several days or longer before even the initial effects of Trump’s diagnosis can be ascertained by pollsters.
The debates long loomed as one of the president’s best opportunities to reshape the race in his favor. He has trailed in Pennsylvania and Florida from the outset of the campaign, and he does not have many credible paths to the presidency without winning at least one of the two — and probably both.
Instead, a mere 21 per cent of likely voters across the two pivotal states said Trump won the debate Tuesday. It leaves the president at a significant and even daunting disadvantage with a month until Election Day.
In follow-up interviews with half a dozen mainly Republican respondents, none said the president’s coronavirus diagnosis was affecting their voting decision. But some said the debate did affect the way they were thinking about the election, with all but one using the word “bully” to describe the president.
Voters disapproved of the president’s conduct in the debate by a margin of 65 per cent to 25 per cent. More than half of voters said they strongly disapproved of his conduct.
“I think that Donald Trump acted like a big bully on the stage,” said Cindy Von Waldner, 63, a lifelong Republican from Titusville, Florida. The president began to lose her support when the pandemic hit, and she said she did not believe he took it seriously enough or was transparent enough with the American people. She said she would most likely vote for Biden, her first time casting a Democratic ballot.
The revulsion against Trump’s performance extended well into his reliable base. One-third of the president’s supporters said they disapproved of his performance, including 11 per cent who did so strongly. A modest but potentially significant 8 per cent of people who backed him in the survey said the debate made them less likely to support Trump’s candidacy.
The debate didn’t change the mind of Peralte Roseme, a 35-year-old independent in West Palm Beach, Florida, who voted for President Barack Obama and now plans to vote for Trump. Roseme, who is Black, said it felt “horrible” that he refused to directly condemn white supremacists and told one far-right group to “stand by,” but he supported Trump in the survey.
“I don’t think he’s racist or anything like that,” he said of Trump. Instead, he said he thought Trump was thinking, “I just don’t want to lose votes. These are people in my corner; why would I put them down?”
In a direct comparison with a Times/Siena survey of Pennsylvania conducted before the debate, the president’s personal ratings slumped across the board. The share of voters who thought Trump had the temperament and personality to be president dropped by more than a net 10 percentage points.
The president and his allies had long argued that Biden would disqualify himself with a poor performance in the debates, creating an opening for the president to reassemble his winning coalition. But Pennsylvania voters were about as likely to say Biden had the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president as they were before the debate. More voters said Trump didn’t have the mental sharpness it takes than said the same of Biden.
While Trump failed to capitalize on a rare opportunity to claw back into the race, the findings suggest that the debate did not shift the contest decisively in Biden’s direction, either. The results were close to the average of pre-debate surveys in both states, another reflection of the unusually stable polling results before the election. In Pennsylvania, the race was even somewhat closer than it was in a Times/Siena poll conducted before the debate, which found Biden ahead by 9 percentage points.
The lack of additional gains by Biden after the first debate might have been all but inevitable in a deeply polarized country. But it might also suggest that Biden, like the president, failed to capitalize on opportunities of his own.
Overall, voters split roughly evenly between whether the debate made them more or less likely to support Biden or whether the debate made no difference at all. While most voters approved of the way he handled himself during the debate, his personal ratings nonetheless held steady or even declined compared with the survey taken before the debate in Pennsylvania.
After the debate, Pennsylvania voters were less likely to say that Biden was a strong leader, perhaps reflecting that the president tended to dominate the discussion — even if it was often to his disadvantage. Voters were also somewhat less likely to say Biden had the temperament to be an effective president.
Only 37 per cent of likely voters thought Biden won the debate, with an even larger number — 42 per cent — refusing to confer victory on either candidate.
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