CNN poll: Harris defeats Trump in debate

Registered American voters who watched Tuesday's debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump say 63% to 37% that Harris performed better, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, UNN reports.

Details

Before the debate, the same voters were equally divided on which candidate would perform better: 50% said Harris would do it, and 50% said Trump would.

The poll results reflect opinions about the debate only among those voters who tuned in and are not representative of the views of the general voting public. Debate watchers in the survey were 6 points more likely to be Republicans than Democrats, representing an audience that leans about 4 percentage points more toward the Republican Party than all registered voters in the country.

"But the results mark a shift from June, when voters who watched the debate between Trump and Joe Biden said 67% to 33% that Trump outperformed his Democratic rival. In 2020 and 2016, Biden and Hillary Clinton, according to debate observers, outperformed Trump during the presidential debates," the channel points out.

Addendum

Methodology: The CNN poll was conducted via text message among 605 registered U.S. voters who said they watched Tuesday's debate, and the results reflect the views of debate watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate prior to the debate and were selected through a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative group recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. The results for the full sample of debate observers have a sampling error of plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.