Hillary supporters say she won the debate and point to polls. Bernie supporters say he won the debate and point to social media. The latest poll entry getting a lot of attention is a new poll released by NBC News which indicates Clinton won the debate and re-energized her supporters. Is that a reason why news reports now say Team Biden is are reportedly Veep is suggesting he could jump into the race? The latest NBC News poll:
Hillary Clinton’s performance in Tuesday night’s debate resonated strongly among members of her party, with more than half—56%—saying she won the debate. Just 3% of Democrats who watched or followed coverage of the debate said she did worst, giving her a net performance score of +53. Bernie Sanders scored a +30, showing he still appealed to a significant number of Democrats, according to the latest NBC News online poll conducted nationwide by SurveyMonkey from Tuesday evening immediately following the debate until Thursday morning.
Before the debate, a number of pundits said Martin O’Malley needed a breakout performance similar to Carly Fiorina’s first debate, in order to gain name recognition and put some momentum behind his campaign. But O’Malley fell short of that goal, with a tepid score of -6. Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb were also rated poorly, scoring a -21 and -24 respectively.
AND:
The primary race looks fairly unchanged since last month for the top two Democratic contenders. Clinton leads Sanders by 14 points among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. Support for Joe Biden has dropped off by 5 points, possibly due to diminished expectations for the vice president’s entry into the race.
But if Biden jumps in now, it could be that not being in that first debate will in retrospect be seen as a mistake, because it helped Clinton re-gain some of her lost support and strengthen (in the minds of some pundits and analysts) her image. She had started to see some of her support drift away:
In last month’s NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll we saw the erosion of a number of key Democratic voting groups from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. The voting public is notoriously fickle at this time in the campaign season, with more than three months to the first caucus or primary. With the caveat that these subgroups have smaller sample sizes, and therefore tend to have more volatility, a number of important voting groups – men, whites, blacks, college graduates, and those over 65 are back in Clinton’s camp.
What to make of these various polls and claims of victory?
Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore puts it into perspective, noting the who “really” won debate:
But aside from pundit reaction, the more scientific surveys deployed the next day started showing a very different picture: A HuffPost/YouGov poll of Democrats who watched the debate deemed HRC the winner by a 55/22 margin. An NBC/Survey Monkey poll found similar results. And even if you don’t assign party elites the sort of central role in the nominating process many political scientists regularly give them, they do matter, and thus, so, too, does Politico’s survey of big Democratic boppers in Iowa and NH, who rated Clinton the “runaway winner.”
Now you can spin this stuff every which way: maybe the day-after surveys were inappropriately influenced by pro-HRC talking heads on the TV networks, or maybe hyper-enthusaistic Bernie fans artificially dominated focus groups and snap polls. My own assessment was that both candidates did well with perhaps a strategic advantage to Clinton for escaping what had become a media death watch and also for a more general-election-friendly tone. But we should understand that perceptions of what we see with our own eyes are often fluid.
graphic via shutterstock.com
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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.