What the polls say after the first presidential debate

[TheProle]

Much of the initial post-debate polling has shown Trump in a stronger position relative to where he was in the last pre-debate surveys from the same pollsters. For instance, Democratic-aligned pollster Data for Progress released a national survey conducted the day after the debate that found Trump ahead of Biden 48 percent to 45 percent, whereas an early May poll from the same outfit had Biden ahead 47 percent to 46 percent. In its post-debate survey, Suffolk University/USA Today found Trump leading 41 percent to 38 percent (with Robert Kennedy Jr. at 8 percent), a shift from a tied race in late April. Leger, a Canadian pollster, found an especially dramatic shift in its polling collaboration with the conservative New York Post, going from Biden +2 just before the debate to Trump +7 right afterwards.

That's not to say every poll found Trump gaining. Some other pollsters, such as SurveyUSA, also released post-debate numbers that had Trump ahead nationally, but don't have a relatively recent point of comparison (SurveyUSA last released a nationwide poll in February, in which Trump actually had a slightly larger lead). Morning Consult's national polling found the race essentially unchanged, with a pre-debate tracking survey showing the two candidates tied at 44 percent and the comparable post-debate tracker showing Trump up 44 percent to 43 percent. CNN/SSRS's new poll found Trump leading 49 percent to 43 percent in a head-to-head matchup, but those are the same numbers as the pollster found in late April. And we're still waiting for some other high-profile pollsters to give us their first post-debate snapshot of the race. In line with G. Elliott Morris's analysis of historical polling last week, we usually like to see about two weeks of data after a high-profile event to gauge just how much a race has shifted.

Nonetheless, some post-debate surveys offered other negative data points for Biden's standing with voters after the debate — including those in his own party. In the 538/Ipsos post-debate survey, conducted using Ipsos's KnowledgePanel, just 20 percent of likely voters, down from 27 percent before the debate, rated Biden's mental fitness to be president as excellent or good — that includes a drop from 56 percent to 42 percent specifically among Democrats. And just 15 percent of voters after the debate said his physical fitness to be president was excellent or good, down from 21 percent before the event. Similarly, a YouGov/CBS News post-debate poll found that only 27 percent of registered voters thought Biden had the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, compared with 50 percent overall who felt Trump did. Among Democrats, only about three-fifths thought Biden had the mental wherewithal to do the job

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https://abcnews.go.com/538/polls-after-presidential-debate/story?id=111610497