….neatly demonstrating that voters weren’t impressed by either of the geriatrics. Overall it seems Trump won the debate, but didn’t change many minds. The race remains pretty much the same. The party that pulls their candidate for a sensible new candidate will probably win this race.
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538/Ipsos poll of debate watchers found little impact on votes
The poll by 538 and Ipsos, was conducted (using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel) among likely voters before and after the debate. Biden clearly lost the debate, according to their responses, but there wasn’t much of an impact on their potential votes:
[T]urning in the best performance in a debate only matters if it translates into votes — so we also asked poll respondents (both those who watched the debate and those who didn’t) which candidates they were considering voting for after the debate. And if there was any silver lining from the debate for Biden, this was it: The face-off doesn’t seem to have caused many people to reconsider their vote. That said, Biden did lose a small share of potential voters: Post-debate, 46.7 percent of likely voters said they were considering voting for him, which was 1.6 percentage points lower than before the debate. (Note that this was not a straight horse-race poll; respondents could say they were considering voting for multiple candidates.)
Trump’s support, meanwhile, barely budged, perhaps a reflection of the fact that, while Biden performed poorly on Thursday night, voters weren’t especially impressed with Trump’s performance either. The share of likely voters who said they were considering voting for Trump after the debate climbed from 43.5 percent to just 43.9 percent.
Despite not participating in the debate, third-party candidates actually gained more ground than Trump: Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gained 1.1 points in potential support, Green Party candidate Jill Stein went from 3.1 percent to 4.2 percent and Libertarian Chase Oliver went from 2.7 percent to 3.9 percent.
538 also notes that the percentage of double haters who dislike both Biden and Trump remained unchanged before and after the debate at 21 percent.