You’d never know it on Twitter, following some of the most reliably pro-Trump people who insist that the widely-shunned Republican Presidential nominee “won” the third debate and now has momentum to win the general election. But a major non-online poll now indicates Democratic Presidential nominee won the debate and is not finding her numbers dropping:
Hillary Clinton maintains her lead over Donald Trump after sweeping the general election debates Wednesday, with a healthy plurality of voters naming her the winner of the final presidential discourse.
According to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, the first national post-debate survey, 43 percent of registered voters said the Democratic candidate won, compared with 26 percent who opted for the Republican Party’s standard bearer. Her 6-point lead over Trump among likely voters is unchanged from our previous survey: Clinton still leads Trump 42 percent to 36 percent in the race for the White House, with Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson taking 9 percent of the vote and Green Party candidate Jill Stein slotting in as the top choice for 4 percent.
Clinton’s 17-point margin of victory in the final debate was up 3 points from the town hall-style forum weeks ago, but still not as wide as the first debate, when voters backed her by a 21-point margin. Six in 10 voters watched the debate, the same as the second but down from the first debate (viewed by 68 percent).
As Election Day nears, voters are viewing the debate performances with lesser importance. Roughly half (49 percent) said the debates were important to how they vote, compared with 62 percent of voters who said it would be important after the first debate in late September.
And here’s just a tiny taste of what you see on Twitter from Trump supporters:
The momentum has swung to @realDonaldTrump after that debate. All we need to do now is stay on message & cover the @wikileaks as they drop.
— Enraged American ? (@PatriotByGod) October 21, 2016
My prediction of Trump victory is not overconfidence. The evidence is obvious.
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) October 21, 2016
None of this is to say that there could not be some huge event that changes the apparent course of the election, but it increasingly seems as it voters are locking in their choices, which do not suggest a trend towards Trump. Here’s the latest Pollster average of polls:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.