All available indicators suggest that the turnaround has been triggered by the events of the debate, where Harris was broadly seen as cutting a calm, controlled figure while getting under the skin of Trump – who repeatedly veered off policy message to go on wild tangents about immigrants and crowd sizes at his rallies.
While so far declining Harris’s challenge of a second debate, the former president nevertheless claims that he won the exchange.
Survey respondents beg to differ. The Reuters/Ipsos polls showed 53% who had heard something about the encounter believed that Harris had come out on top, as opposed to 24% thinking Trump had prevailed. The Morning Consult poll showed a similar margin, 55-25%, in favour of thinking Harris had won.
That is broadly in line with three earlier post-debate polls – conducted by CNN, YouGov, and CNN – which gave Harris an average debate-winning margin of 23%.
“She definitely got a bump – and if those polls are accurate, a little more of a bump than I thought,” said John Zogby, a veteran pollster who believes key moments in some debates had small but decisive impacts on the outcomes of past presidential elections.
“Clearly Kamala Harris won the debate. There are enough polls out to show that and other observers beyond the polls also believe that she won. I think, more importantly, Trump lost the debate. He lost a lot of credibility, in addition to having lost the debate.”
The burning question, however, is whether one lost debate translates into a lost election.
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and strategist who forecast in advance of the debate that its winner would prevail in November, suggested that the sour nature of Trump’s showing had sealed his electoral fate.
“It was a pretty negative performance. Pretty pessimistic, cynical, contemptuous, and I think that this will cost him, yes,” he told the interviewer Piers Morgan. “I think that he loses because of this debate performance.”
Although eight weeks separate Tuesday’s debate from election day on 5 November, the wafer-thin polling margins – particularly in key battleground states – mean the ripples emanating from Trump’s multiple miscues are likely to have an outsize effect, Luntz argued.
“There are very few undecided voters left,” he said. “It’s about 5% of the vote – and they only matter in seven states. And those states are too close to call. So essentially, we are looking at less than 1% of America. But they heard nothing from Trump to give them a sense of anything that would be different going forward.”"
One additional piece of fallout from Tuesday’s debate might tilt the balance in Harris’s direction – the intervention of Taylor Swift.
The singer endorsed Harris immediately after the event, a move that prompted about 400,000 people to visit a voter registration link she posted on her Instagram, which has 284 million followers. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/14/polls-harris-ahead-trump-election#:~:text=All%20available%20indicators,different%20going%20forward.%E2%80%9D
