As I noted last night, Hillary Clinton turned in a very solid debate performance. She was polished, turned away questions about what would seem to be her greatest vulnerabilities with confident and convincing pivots and more than anything else she had the feel of a candidate on the rebound. As I also wrote last night, the collapse of the ‘Benghazi’ committee and its associated nonsense came at the perfect moment for her. The debate would have had a very different feel to it had it been held six weeks ago.
We were running Insight polls overnight and this morning, gauging reactions to the debate and re-testing Democratic primary preference questions we’ve been running for the last four months. Based on those results I would expect you’ll see Hillary get a substantial boost in the polls coming out of night’s first debate.
Let me give you a basic breakdown.
First, Bernie Sanders had a really good night too. Just based on my own impression, if you’re a fan of Bernie Sanders or someone whose politics make you at all amenable to being a fan of Bernie Sanders, you like what you saw. I saw some commentators say he started wobbly and then got stronger over the course of the night. I didn’t see that. He seemed strong throughout. And our numbers show that his already high favorability numbers actually went up significantly. His unfavorables, already low, plummeted. Remember, even if you’re a Democratic news junkie and know about Sanders and his campaign, there are many people for whom this was the first time seeing speak live for a substantial amount of time.
Hillary’s favorability numbers also went up, but not dramatically. Where you see the difference is on candidate preference where her support shot up a lot. She took some support from Sanders, but not much. Where she got most of her support was from people who’d been supporting Joe Biden (obviously not even in the race) and people who’d moved into the undecided column. Another way to put this is that she managed to consolidate her natural support which had frayed considerably over the months of pillorying over the email stories. As I said, she did very well and expect this performance to drive her poll numbers a lot.
