Voters say Harris won the debate but not necessarily their votes

Following Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, voters said they had more confidence that the Democratic nominee would go on to win the presidential election.

“I do think she looked presidential,” Craig Ellis, a Democratic voter from California. That was one thing he told WORLD before the debate that he hoped to see Harris pull off on the stage.

“I hoped that her experience as a prosecutor would help her in the debate. And I do think we saw [District Attorney] Harris,” Ellis said. He added that Harris was able to “bait” Trump on several occasions. “And he seemed to take the bait,” he said. During the night, Harris took jabs at Trump such as claiming that attendees left Trump’s rallies early out of boredom.

In the days leading up to the Sept. 10 debate, independent research company SSRS conducted a survey of 605 registered voters through text message. Half of the respondents said they expected Trump to outperform Harris in the debate, while half expected the opposite outcome. But by the end of the debate, respondents had shifted dramatically. Regardless of how they planned to vote, 63 percent said they believed Harris had done a better job in the debate, and only 37 percent said Trump had done a better job.

Conservatives like Liliana Zylstra, a pro-life voter from Michigan, were among those disappointed with Trump’s performance. Before the debate, she told WORLD she was concerned that Trump had backtracked on firm positions about abortion he had seemed to articulate in 2016 and 2020. Zylstra wanted to see Trump revisit and clarify those positions.

During the debate, Trump reiterated that he was proud of appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and highlighted the extreme positions of pro-abortion politicians in some states. But in Zylstra’s view, his approach to the abortion issue ultimately fell short.

“Trump’s debate performance was disappointing. He’s afraid of taking a principled stand on the issue of abortion, and that showed tonight,” Zylstra said.

Fifty-two percent of respondents to the SSRS survey said after the debate that they believed Harris would do a better job of handling the abortion issue, regardless of which candidate they support. Only 31 percent said the same of Trump.

According to the Election Betting Odds tracker, Harris on Wednesday afternoon had a 51 percent chance of winning compared to Trump’s nearly 48 percent. That’s a nearly 4 point increase for Harris since the beginning of Tuesday’s debate and a 3 point decrease for Trump.

But the SSRS survey also found that the debate only led 4 percent of respondents to change their minds about how they planned to vote. Fourteen percent said it made them reconsider but not change their minds, and another 82 percent said it did not affect their choice for president at all.