NYT: Harris Had Stronger Debate, Polls Find, but the Race Remains Deadlocked [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

Link to tweet

Richard Stengel
My favorite statistic in this morning’s NYT poll is that by and large the only group of voters who didn’t think Trump lost the debate were those who didn’t watch it.

Harris Had Stronger Debate, Polls Find, but the Race Remains Deadlocked

Kamala Harris holds an edge over Donald J. Trump in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. But new surveys found that the race remains a tossup nationally.

By Shane Goldmacher and Ruth Igielnik
Sept. 19, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET



Kamala Harris overwhelmingly impressed voters in her debate with Donald J. Trump, a new set of polls from The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College found, but she has failed so far to seize a decisive advantage in the presidential campaign.

The race is deadlocked nationally. Yet in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, Ms. Harris has a lead of four percentage points — a slight edge that is unchanged since early August. She has reassembled much of the core Democratic coalition in the state, winning the support of Black voters, younger voters and women there.

[Combined, the two polls are a bit of a puzzle, Nate Cohn writes.]

The vice president received far stronger reviews of her debate performance last week than did Mr. Trump, with 67 percent of U.S. likely voters saying she did well compared with 40 percent for him. A majority of voters in every racial group, age bracket and education level — even white voters without a college degree, who are typically the former president’s most loyal demographic — gave her a positive review.



But even that was not enough to jostle a race that appears destined to become a battle of inches this fall, after a summer of tumult and upheaval.

/snip