Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was perceived as the winner of the final debate with Donald Trump on Thursday night, according to a CNN poll of debate viewers and a panel of undecided North Carolina voters.
Though the groups are not representative of actual US voters, they offered a snapshot of the reaction to the debate, which came just two weeks before election day, as Trump trails his opponent in national polls and was seeking to reset his appeal with more moderate Republican supporters.
The CNN poll found it was perceived as a slightly weaker performance compared to the first, chaotic presidential debate last month, when 60% of viewers perceived Biden as the winner, compared to 53% on Thursday night.
Participants in a CNN panel of undecided North Carolina voters said that Trump’s strength in the debate was his focus on the economy, while Biden’s strength was his emphasis on “unifying” Americans.
The CNN undecided voter panel praised the final debate as “more controlled” and “much better”. Almost all of the voters on that panel said that Biden won the debate.
But the takeaways from a focus group of undecided voters assembled by the Los Angeles Times and pollster Frank Luntz was less positive for Biden.
Words that the undecided voters in that panel used to describe Biden’s debate performance included: “vague”, “cognitively impaired”, “I don’t want to say senile, so I’ll say old”, “uncomfortable”, “grandfatherly”, “defensive”, and “ambiguous”, Associated Press reporter Jill Colvin tweeted.
Trump was described by the same group as “controlled”, “constrained”, “petulant” “reserved”, “surprisingly presidential”, and a “con artist”, Colvin wrote.
A small group of voters who watched the debate for PBS NewsHour and said the debate left them feeling “informed.” They praised moderator Kristen Welker, an NBC White House correspondent. A woman on CNN’s undecided panel also hailed the debate’s much-touted mute button. “That made a big difference,” she said.
Even on a day when the United States saw the third-highest total number of new coronavirus cases, at more than 73,000, according to the Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project, some undecided voters shared Trump’s emphasis on keeping businesses open, whatever the public health cost.
“Like Donald Trump said, if we shut down the economy at the expense of the people, there’s not going to be a country to come back to,” one voter on CNN’s undecided panel said.
As they did in the first debate, pro-Trump viewers spent a lot of time complaining about perceived bias of the debate moderator towards Biden, and claiming that Trump was cut off more often.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
