Reuters Focus Group of Undecided Voters Swings to Trump After Debate
Like many other news services, Reuters decided to have a focus group of undecided voters who could react to the debate.
If Reuters was hoping to prop up Kamala Harris, then things did not go as planned. The majority of the group swung to Trump after the debate.
Predictably, the media rushed to declare Kamala the winner, but voters saw something else.
Kamala Harris was widely seen as dominating Tuesday’s presidential debate against Republican former president Donald Trump, but a group of undecided voters remained unconvinced that the Democratic vice president was the better candidate.
Reuters interviewed 10 people who were still unsure how they were going to vote in the Nov. 5 election before they watched the debate. Six said afterward they would now either vote for Trump or were leaning toward backing him. Three said they would now back Harris and one was still unsure how he would vote.
Harris and Trump are in a tight race and the election will likely be decided by just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, many of whom are swing voters like the undecided voters who spoke to Reuters.
Although the sample size was small, the responses suggested Harris might need to provide more detailed policy proposals to win over undecided voters s who have yet to make up their minds.
Harris came into it as a cipher, and that’s the way she left it as well, thanks in large part to the efforts by ABCs moderators. They rarely pressed her for specifics on policies, and only lightly challenged her wide-ranging flip-flops over the last eight weeks or so.
Only a couple of days after finally producing an issues page and nearly two months of refusing to talk to reporters (except for 26 minutes on CNN), undecided voters wanted some “meat on the bones,” as one focus-group member told Reuters.
