What Polling Tells Us Ahead of the Vice-Presidential Debate

Vice-presidential debates have been taking place for more than 40 years, but there has never been one that felt this consequential. President Trump is still receiving treatment for the coronavirus, and both his age, 74, and Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s, 77, would make them the oldest people in United States history to begin a term as president.

At the very least, the debate Wednesday night between Senator Kamala Harris and the incumbent vice president, Mike Pence, promises to be a more civil battle of ideas than the presidential shoutfest last week. But it is also the biggest chance for these candidates to audition on the national stage and present themselves as viable deputies after a campaign season dominated by the president and the pandemic.

Mr. Pence and Ms. Harris are both confronting an electorate that is more or less divided. About one-fifth of voters say they don’t have much of an opinion of each candidate, but among those who do, strong opinions outnumber mildly favorable or unfavorable views.

“Will it have any impact on the numbers?” Ashley Koning, a political scientist at Rutgers University who directs the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, asked of this week’s debate. “I don’t necessarily think so.”

“The main thing is for Pence and Harris to prove that they have what it takes, and to show that they can be a heartbeat away from the presidency,” she added. “Given the circumstances, it’s a pretty significant role.”

Has Pence’s role in the virus response affected views of him?

Throughout his vice presidency, Mr. Pence has in many ways offered a perfect foil to Mr. Trump by projecting the image of a quiet, spotlight-skirting deputy to the bombastic commander in chief. In an era when voters are far more likely to say they object to Mr. Trump’s style than to his substance (and most still think he would handle the economy better than Mr. Biden), Mr. Pence might stand to benefit from this more understated brand of conservatism.

But Ms. Harris is unlikely to let him easily escape the fact that he was appointed to lead the White House’s coronavirus response — a response that a wide majority of Americans not only disapprove of, but also have come to resent.

More than two-thirds of Americans said in an Axios/Ipsos poll late last month that they had little confidence in the federal government to look out for their best interests in regards to the pandemic.

Still, in CNN polling conducted after Mr. Trump announced his positive coronavirus test results on Friday, 62 percent of Americans said they thought Mr. Pence was qualified to serve as president. Just 35 percent said they didn’t think so. (Men were 12 points more likely than women to find him qualified.)

The results suggested that the vice president’s role in the virus response had not damaged the perception that he is at least a competent leader: In a similarly worded ABC News/Washington Post poll question over the summer, 54 percent of Americans called Mr. Pence qualified.

When Fox News asked voters in May about Mr. Pence’s handling of the virus crisis, they were about evenly split, with 47 percent saying he had handled it well and 45 percent saying he hadn’t. That put him far behind state governments, which received broadly positive reviews, but ahead of the president, whose virus response by then was rated poorly by more than half of voters.

A Fox poll last month found voters nationwide split evenly on Mr. Pence’s performance over all, 48 percent to 48 percent. A Monmouth University poll conducted around the same time among a sample of all Americans included an option for respondents to say they didn’t have an opinion; 19 percent said that, and Mr. Pence’s favorability rating tipped slightly negative.

Harris is the only top candidate with net-positive ratings — but not by a lot.

Onstage, Mr. Pence is an adroit debater. In the 2016 vice-presidential debate, he adeptly stayed on the attack against Senator Tim Kaine while steadily repositioning his focus onto criticisms of Hillary Clinton. This time, rather than treating the race’s only female candidate as debate fodder, he’ll go up against her directly. In Ms. Harris, he will confront a former prosecutor who has proved both in debates and at Senate hearings that she can use an attack to make strong ideological arguments.

Ms. Harris tends to fare slightly better than Mr. Pence in terms of public perception, and on average national polling shows more Americans viewing her positively than negatively. In the Monmouth poll from early September, 43 percent gave her positive marks, and 37 percent saw her negatively. As with Mr. Pence, one in five said they had no opinion.

“She’s the only one of the four political figures who has a net-positive favorability rating on average,” Dr. Koning said, referring to the presidential and vice-presidential candidates. “While people are split on each one of these candidates, she at least is a few points higher.”

“But there’s still room for opinions to be formed on her, and it will be a big night for her to present herself on the national stage,” she added.

How will the fight over plexiglass play?

Despite widespread concern over the coronavirus, recent polling showed that a wide majority of Americans wanted the debates to go forward. More than three-quarters of likely voters in both Pennsylvania and Florida told New York Times/Siena College pollsters last week that they thought the other two presidential debates should go ahead as planned. But many of those respondents were contacted before Mr. Trump announced he had tested positive.

In the CNN poll taken after his diagnosis was made public, 63 percent of Americans said they thought the president had acted irresponsibly toward those around him in handling the risk of infection. That included more than seven in 10 women, and even a majority of white people without college degrees, a core Trump constituency.

While he has tested negative in recent days, Mr. Pence attended a White House event that has been linked to numerous officials who have since tested positive for the virus. Medical experts say there is still a chance that he could be carrying the virus.

Americans have consistently said in polls that they preferred to lean toward caution with regard to lifting virus restrictions. This makes it politically puzzling, Dr. Koning said, that the vice president’s team pushed back Tuesday on the Commission on Presidential Debates’s plan to place plexiglass dividers around both candidates during the debate.

“If she’s more comfortable with plexiglass, then that’s fine,” Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, told reporters yesterday.

After a round of negotiations on Tuesday evening, the vice president’s team agreed to go along with the plan.

“The debate hasn’t even started yet and there’s arguments over plexiglass and whether it’s going to be used,” Dr. Koning said. “He’s not starting on the best foot, given the virus itself and given the back-and-forth about how the debate is actually going to go.”