
Of those respondents, 757 watched the debate. 20 to 21 among 2,077 likely Democratic primary voters who had previously responded to the first wave it has a margin of error of +/- 2.3 percentage points. The second wave of the poll began after the debate ended and collected data from Nov. For the likely Democratic primary voter subset of respondents, the poll has a margin of error of +/- 1.71 percentage points. 18 among a general population sample of adults, with 3,786 respondents who say they are likely to vote in their state’s Democratic primary or caucus. The first wave of the poll was conducted from Nov. An initial wave of polling was conducted before the debates began, with a follow-up wave after the debate. For this study, the same group of respondents is interviewed before and after the debate to track whether and how their answers changed. How the race changedĪll the data presented here comes from polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a probability-based online panel that is recruited to be representative of the U.S. Tom Steyer and (especially) Gabbard received the worst marks. In terms of raw debate grades - respondents graded candidates on a four-point scale (higher scores are better) - Buttigieg and Warren tied for first in their average scores they were closely followed by Sanders and Booker. On the other hand, Tulsi Gabbard’s and Joe Biden’s performance scores were notably low in relation to their pre-debate popularity. Candidates like Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, who are polling well behind the leaders, also got strong performance scores relative to their pre-debate favorability ratings. One thing that immediately stands out: Respondents, on average, thought Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren had the strongest debate performances, which is especially notable for Buttigieg because he was slightly less well-liked going into the night. how debate-watchers rated their performance. To better understand which candidates did well or poorly Wednesday night, we plotted how favorably respondents rated the candidates before the debate vs.
