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Seven candidates participated in Tuesday’s debate, hosted by CBS News in Charleston, South Carolina. With the state’s primary looming this Saturday, the stakes were high, and we once again partnered with Ipsos to track how the debate affected likely primary voters’ feelings about the candidates. The FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, conducted using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, interviewed the same group of voters twice, once on either side of the debate, to capture both the “before” and “after” picture.
To better understand which candidates did well or poorly, we plotted how favorably respondents rated the candidates before the debate vs. how debate-watchers rated candidates’ performances afterward. The first thing that stands out from last night’s debate is that Democratic voters were not especially thrilled with anyone’s performance. And as you’ll see, there’s no consistent theme to who voters responded well to, and their responses add up to a somewhat muddled picture of the debate’s effects. That said, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg got the highest average performance marks, closely followed by former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, got a middle-of-the-pack performance score, but because of her relatively high pre-debate favorability ratings, you’d expect a lot of voters to be predisposed to viewing her debate performance in a positive light, and her score doesn’t look as impressive in comparison. (The same is true for Sanders, even though he got the highest average marks.)
Candidate | Pre-debate favorability | Debate performance |
---|---|---|
Bernie Sanders | 64.7% | 3.0 |
Pete Buttigieg | 61.3 | 3.0 |
Joe Biden | 59.3 | 2.9 |
Amy Klobuchar | 56.9 | 2.8 |
Elizabeth Warren | 62.4 | 2.8 |
Tom Steyer | 49.6 | 2.6 |
Michael Bloomberg | 46.7 | 2.5 |
In terms of raw debate grades — respondents graded candidates on a four-point scale (higher scores are better) — the clear losers were billionaire activist Tom Steyer and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. However, their scores do look a little better judged against their relatively mediocre pre-debate favorability ratings.
Respondents could pick multiple candidates or ‘someone else.’
Tuesday’s debate didn’t trigger any big moves in who respondents said they were considering supporting, like the ones we saw in some previous debates. Warren had the biggest shift, and it’s not all that big — she lost about 2 percentage points in potential support. Klobuchar lost nearly as much. And the only two women on stage were also the only candidates whose potential support declined by more than a point. But no one gained much either. Sanders and Bloomberg had the biggest improvements, and they only added just over 1 point worth of potential supporters. Biden, Steyer and Buttigieg barely budged.
We also asked likely Democratic primary voters how favorably they felt about each candidate both before and after the debate. Everyone except Warren improved their net favorability rating, though really only Biden’s and, to a lesser extent, Klobuchar’s improved by a meaningful amount. Warren, meanwhile, lost about 2 points in net favorability.
Finally, we asked respondents to estimate each Democrat’s chances of defeating Trump, from 0 percent (no chance) to 100 percent (certain to win). Going into the debate, voters thought Sanders and Biden were most likely to beat Trump. That was still true after the debate, and Sanders even improved his average rating by a hair. But it was actually Steyer whose rating rose the most, improving by just over 2 points. Buttigieg and Warren saw their average scores fall slightly.
Candidate | Pre-debate average | Post-debate average | Diff. |
---|---|---|---|
Tom Steyer | 27.8 | 30.1 | +2.3 |
Bernie Sanders | 59.4 | 60.2 | +0.8 |
Joe Biden | 56.0 | 56.1 | +0.1 |
Michael Bloomberg | 50.8 | 50.3 | -0.6 |
Amy Klobuchar | 37.1 | 36.5 | -0.7 |
Pete Buttigieg | 45.4 | 44.0 | -1.4 |
Elizabeth Warren | 47.5 | 46.0 | -1.6 |
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