Maybe you watched the first presidential debate of 2016. Maybe you’re an American voter. And maybe, just maybe, you felt one candidate was a very clear winner by the end of it all. The only question you should now be asking yourself is “how many other people in the country agreed with me?”
I have one poll (and a whole bunch of caveats) for you. The poll suggests that the debate was a huge success for Hillary Clinton. The caveats suggest Democrats don’t have a reason to celebrate yet.
The poll was jointly conducted by media channel CNN and research company ORC late last night. The interviewers called up people they had already identified who said they planned on watching the debate. The survey started out with this question:
“Regardless of which candidate you happen to support, who do you think did the best job in the debate – Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?”
At 62%, it was a clear win for Clinton, while just 27% said Trump (6% said “both equally” and 4% said “neither” candidate won the debate). The other polling questions seemed to confirm a clear victory:
Who seemed to be the stronger leader?
Clinton 56%
Trump 39%
Who was more sincere and authentic? (Note: this has been a problem for Clinton in the past.)
Clinton 53%
Trump 40%
Overall, did the debate make you more likely to vote for a candidate?
Clinton 34%
Trump 18%
It all sounds like bad news for Republicans right? Maybe not. The poll was conducted among 521 people – even though those people were all registered voters, that’s still not very many views you’re collecting.
There’s another thing too – the entire poll was skewed towards Clinton to start off with. Of the people CNN/ORC spoke to, 41% identified themselves as Democrats and 26% identified as Republican (the rest said they were Independents). So you would have expected Clinton to do better, regardless of how she performed during the debate.
If you’re feeling particularly skeptical, you should pay attention to “the margin of error” on a poll. On this one, it was +/- 4.5 percentage points which means that Clinton’s lead could be much larger (take that last question above – the true national number could be as high as 38.5% choosing Clinton) or it could be much smaller (maybe only 29.5% did). When you take into account the fact that there were a lot of Democrats in this survey, that lead suddenly looks a lot less impressive.
One last thing – and you’ll hear me say this a lot – it’s only one poll. Anyone who tells you it’s a done deal after last night is probably influenced by confirmation bias which when you interpret new information (eg this poll) in a way that confirms your existing beliefs (eg “I think Clinton did pretty well”).
What actually does offer some promise of predicting voter behavior is taking a big bunch of surveys, each reputable, each with a slightly different methodology, and averaging them out. So, to really understand who won the debate, we’ll need to wait a little while because most surveys take about a week to be conducted, analyzed and then published.
Right now, in polling averages, Clinton currently has 46.7% of support, barely ahead of Trump who receives 44.3%. Viewers not only need to think Clinton did really well in last night’s debate, but they need to be willing to change their voting intention if the former secretary of state wants to win in November.
You can get in touch with any questions you’d like to see answered in this series by emailing mona.chalabi@theguardian.com
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