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By overwhelming margins, voters in Pennsylvania and Florida were repelled by President Trump’s conduct in the first general election debate, according to New York Times / Siena College polls, as Joseph R. Biden Jr. maintained the lead. in the two largest states on the battlefield.
Overall, Biden led by seven percentage points, 49 percent to 42 percent, among potential voters in Pennsylvania. He led by a similar margin, 47-42, among likely voters in Florida.
The polls began Wednesday, before the announcement early Friday that President Trump had contracted the coronavirus. There was modest evidence of a swing in favor of Biden in interviews on Friday, including in Arizona, where a Times / Siena poll is being conducted, after controlling for the demographic and political characteristics of those surveyed.
One day of interviews is not enough to assess the aftermath of a major political event, and it may be several days or more before pollsters can determine the initial effects of Trump’s diagnosis.
The debates were long outlined as one of the president’s best opportunities to reshape the race in his favor. He’s been lagging behind in Pennsylvania and Florida since the start of the campaign, and he doesn’t have many credible paths to the presidency without winning at least one of the two, and probably both.
Instead, only 21 percent of likely voters in the two key states said Trump won the debate on Tuesday. It leaves the president at a significant and even overwhelming disadvantage with a month until Election Day.
In follow-up interviews with half a dozen respondents, mostly Republicans, none said the president’s coronavirus diagnosis was affecting their voting decision. But some said the debate did affect the way they thought about the election, and all but one used the word “bully” to describe the president.
Voters disapproved of the president’s conduct in debate by a 65 to 25 percent margin. More than half of the voters said they strongly disapproved of his conduct.
“I think Donald Trump acted like a great bully on stage,” said Cindy Von Waldner, 63, a longtime Republican from Titusville, Florida. The president began to lose his support when the pandemic hit, saying he did not believe he took it seriously enough or was transparent enough with the American people. She said she will most likely vote for Biden, the first time she votes for the Democrats.
The revulsion against Trump’s performance spread to his trusted base. A third of the president’s supporters said they disapproved of his performance, including 11 percent who did so strongly. A modest but potentially significant 8 percent of those who supported him in the poll said the debate made them less likely to support Trump’s candidacy.
The debate did not change the opinion of Peralte Roseme, a 35-year-old independent from West Palm Beach, Florida, who voted for President Obama and now plans to vote for Trump. Roseme, who is black, said it felt “horrible” that Trump refused to directly condemn white supremacists and told a far-right group to “stay out of it” but supported Trump in the poll.
“I don’t think it’s racist or anything like that,” he said of Trump. Instead, he said he thought Trump was thinking, “I just don’t want to lose votes. These are people from my corner; Why would I leave them? “
In a direct comparison to a Pennsylvania Times / Siena poll conducted before the debate, the president’s personal ratings fell across the board. The proportion of voters who thought Trump had the temperament and personality to be president dropped by more than 10 percentage points net.
The president and his allies had long argued that Biden would disqualify himself with a poor performance in debates, creating an opportunity for the president to reorganize his winning coalition. But Pennsylvania voters were almost as likely to say that Biden had the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president as they were before the debate. More voters said Trump lacked the necessary mental acuity than they said the same about Biden.
While Trump didn’t seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get back in the race, the findings suggest that the debate also didn’t decisively shift the contest in Biden’s direction. The results were close to the average for pre-debate polls in both states, another reflection of unusually stable poll results before the elections. In Pennsylvania, the race was even slightly closer than in a Times / Siena poll conducted before the debate, which found Biden ahead by nine percentage points.
Biden’s lack of additional earnings after the first debate could have been almost inevitable in a deeply polarized country. But it could also suggest that Biden, like the president, did not seize his own opportunities.
In general, voters are roughly evenly divided on whether the debate made them more or less likely to support Biden, or whether the debate made no difference. While a majority of voters approved of the way she handled herself during the debate, her personal ratings remained stable or even decreased compared to the poll taken before the debate in Pennsylvania.
After the debate, Pennsylvania voters were less likely to say that Biden was a strong leader, perhaps reflecting that the president tended to dominate the discussion, even if it often hurt him. Voters were also somewhat less likely to say that Biden had the temperament to be an effective president.
Only 37 percent of likely voters thought Biden won the debate, and an even higher number, 42 percent, refused to confer victory on either candidate.
Carl Notarianni, a 59-year-old retired UPS worker, called Biden’s performance “terrible,” in part because he did not respond to a question about whether he planned to add justices to the Supreme Court. He is a Democrat who has become disillusioned with the party and supports President Trump.
Voters said they supported Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court by a margin of 44 to 34 percent in the two states in the first Times / Siena polls conducted entirely after her nomination. But voters continued to trust Mr. Biden rather than the president to select the next Supreme Court justice.
Polls found that voters in Florida and Pennsylvania remained deeply divided along Trump-era family demographics, with the president leading among white voters without a college degree and Mr. Biden responding with a significant advantage among those. non-white voters and four-year-old whites. college graduates.
Biden led among voters 65 and older in both states, continuing one of the most striking electoral changes of this election cycle in two of the nation’s oldest states.
In Pennsylvania, Trump faces a large deficit among college-educated white voters who back Biden, from 59 percent to 31 percent. Biden had a similar 60-32 percent advantage in suburban Philadelphia, doubling Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in the region four years ago.
Nonetheless, Trump remained on the verge of competitiveness in Pennsylvania, thanks to a significant advantage among white voters without a college degree. Overall, Trump led Biden, 58 to 34 percent, among untitled white voters, who make up about half of the state’s likely voters.
Polls have tended to suggest a tighter race in Florida, and pollsters show Trump surprisingly strong among Hispanic voters and, in particular, Cuban Americans. However, the Times / Siena poll found no signs of significant gains by Trump among the state’s Hispanic voters, with Biden leading among that group, 58-34. In Miami-Dade County especially, Mr. Biden leads, 61-30. In both cases, the results are comparable to or better than the Hillary Clinton margin four years ago, although the estimates for smaller subgroups have a considerable margin of sampling error. Biden narrowly led an even smaller sample of fewer than 50 Cuban-American voters, who were registered as Republicans by a margin of nearly two to one.
The margin of error due to sampling in the entire survey was plus or minus 4.2 percentage points in Florida and 4.1 percentage points in Pennsylvania.
Here are the crosstabs and survey methodology.
Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.
