2020 election: Voters in Pennsylvania and Florida ‘repelled’ by Trump in first debate, new poll finds

How current president’s coronavirus diagnosis has affected voter judgement is yet to be seen

By overwhelming margins, voters in Pennsylvania and Florida were repelled by Donald Trump’s conduct in the first general election debate, according to New York Times/Siena College surveys, as Joe Biden maintained a lead in the two largest battleground states.

Overall, Mr Biden led by 7 percentage points, 49 per cent to 42 per cent, among likely voters in Pennsylvania. He led by a similar margin, 47-42, among likely voters in Florida.

The surveys began on Wednesday, before the early Friday announcement that Mr Trump had contracted coronavirus. There was modest evidence of a shift in favour of Mr Biden in interviews on Friday, including in Arizona, where a Times/Siena survey is in progress, after controlling for the demographic and political characteristics of the respondents.

One day of interviews is not enough to evaluate the consequences of a major political development, and it may be several days or longer before even the initial effects of Mr Trump’s diagnosis can be ascertained by pollsters.

The debates long loomed as one of the president’s best opportunities to reshape the race in his favour. He has trailed in Pennsylvania and Florida from the outset of the campaign, and he does not have many credible paths to the presidency without winning at least one of the two — and probably both.

Instead, a mere 21 per cent of likely voters across the two pivotal states said Mr Trump won the debate on Tuesday. It leaves the president at a significant and even daunting disadvantage with less than a month until Election Day.

In follow-up interviews with half a dozen, mainly Republican, respondents, none said the president’s coronavirus diagnosis was affecting their voting decision. But some said the debate did affect the way they were thinking about the election, with all but one using the word “bully” to describe the president.

Voters disapproved of the president’s conduct in the debate by a margin of 65 per cent to 25 per cent. More than half of voters said they strongly disapproved of his conduct.

“I think that Donald Trump acted like a big bully on the stage,” said Cindy Von Waldner, a lifelong Republican from Titusville, Florida. The president began to lose her support when the pandemic hit, and she said she did not believe he took it seriously enough or was transparent enough with the American people. She said she would most likely vote for Mr Biden, her first time casting a Democratic ballot.

The revulsion against Mr Trump’s performance extended well into his reliable base. One-third of the president’s supporters said they disapproved of his performance, including 11 per cent who did so strongly. A modest but potentially significant 8 per cent of people who backed him in the survey said the debate made them less likely to support Mr Trump’s candidacy.

The debate didn’t change the mind of Peralte Roseme, an independent in West Palm Beach, Florida, who voted for Barack Obama and now plans to vote for Mr Trump. Mr Roseme, who is black, said it felt “horrible” that he refused to directly condemn white supremacists and told one far-right group to “stand by”, but he supported Mr Trump in the survey.

Trump supporters await Republican celebrities Mark and Patricia McCloskey to arrive in Scranton, Pennsylvania last month (AFP via Getty Images)

“I don’t think he’s racist or anything like that,” he said of Mr Trump. Instead, he said he thought Mr Trump was thinking: “I just don’t want to lose votes. These are people in my corner - why would I put them down?”

In a direct comparison with a Times/Siena survey of Pennsylvania conducted before the debate, the president’s personal ratings slumped across the board. The share of voters who thought Mr Trump had the temperament and personality to be president dropped by more than a net 10 percentage points.

The president and his allies had long argued that Mr Biden would disqualify himself with a poor performance in the debates, creating an opening for the president to reassemble his winning coalition. But Pennsylvania voters were about as likely to say Mr Biden had the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president as they were before the debate. More voters said Mr Trump didn’t have the mental sharpness it takes than said the same of Mr Biden.

While Mr Trump failed to capitalise on a rare opportunity to claw back into the race, the findings suggest that the debate did not shift the contest decisively in Mr Biden’s direction, either. The results were close to the average of pre-debate surveys in both states, another reflection of the unusually stable polling results before the election. In Pennsylvania, the race was even somewhat closer than it was in a Times/Siena poll conducted before the debate, which found Mr Biden ahead by 9 percentage points.

The lack of additional gains by Mr Biden after the first debate might have been all but inevitable in a deeply polarised country. But it might also suggest that Mr Biden, like the president, failed to capitalise on opportunities of his own.

Overall, voters split roughly evenly between whether the debate made them more or less likely to support Mr Biden or whether the debate made no difference at all. While most voters approved of the way he handled himself during the debate, his personal ratings nonetheless held steady or even declined compared with the survey taken before the debate in Pennsylvania.

After the debate, Pennsylvania voters were less likely to say that Mr Biden was a strong leader, perhaps reflecting that the president tended to dominate the discussion — even if it was often to his disadvantage. Voters were also somewhat less likely to say Mr Biden had the temperament to be an effective president.

Biden gets support at Pittsburgh Union Station during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania (Getty)

Only 37 per cent of likely voters thought Mr Biden won the debate, with an even larger number — 42 per cent — refusing to confer victory on either candidate.

Carl Notarianni, a retired UPS worker, called Mr Biden’s performance “terrible”, partly because he wouldn’t answer the question about whether he planned to add Supreme Court justices. He’s a Democrat who has grown disillusioned with the party and supports Mr Trump.

Voters said they supported the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court by a margin of 44 per cent to 34 per cent across the two states in the first Times/Siena surveys conducted entirely after her nomination. But voters continued to trust Mr Biden over the president to select the next Supreme Court Justice.

The polls found that voters in Florida and Pennsylvania remained deeply divided along the familiar demographic lines of the Trump era, with the president leading among white voters without a college degree and Mr Biden countering with a significant lead among nonwhite voters and white, four-year college graduates.

Mr Biden led among voters 65 and older in both states, continuing one of the more surprising electoral shifts of this election cycle in two of the oldest states in the country.

In Pennsylvania, Mr Trump faces a large deficit among white college-educated voters, who back Biden, 59 per cent to 31 per cent. Mr Biden held a similar 60 per cent to 32 per cent lead in the suburbs of Philadelphia, doubling Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in the region four years ago.

Mr Trump nonetheless remained at the edge of competitiveness in Pennsylvania, thanks to a significant lead among white voters without a college degree. Overall, Mr Trump led Mr Biden, 58 per cent to 34 per cent, among white voters without a degree, who represent around half of likely voters in the state.

Surveys have tended to suggest a closer race in Florida, with pollsters showing Mr Trump with surprising strength among Hispanic and particularly Cuban American voters. The Times/Siena poll found no signs of any significant gains by Mr Trump among the state’s Hispanic voters, however, with Mr Biden leading among that group, 58-34. In Miami-Dade County overall, Mr Biden leads, 61-30. 

In both cases, the results are comparable to or better than Ms Clinton’s margin four years ago, though the estimates for smaller subgroups carry a considerable margin of sampling error. Mr Biden narrowly led an even smaller sample of less than 50 Cuban American voters, who were registered as Republicans by nearly a 2-to-1 margin.

The margin of error due to sampling on the full survey was plus or minus 4.2 percentage points in Florida and 4.1 percentage points in Pennsylvania.

New York Times