Biden the winner of final debate, TV viewers and
undecided voters say
Trump considered second best in debate praised as
‘more controlled’ and ‘much better’ than last month’s chaotic affair
Lois
Beckett
@loisbeckett
Fri 23 Oct
2020 06.21 BSTLast modified on Fri 23 Oct 2020 06.45 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/23/biden-trump-presidential-debate-election-viewers
Participants in a CNN panel of undecided North
Carolina voters said that Trump’s strength in the debate was his focus on the
economy, while Biden’s strength was his emphasis on ‘unifying’ Americans.
Democratic
presidential candidate Joe Biden was perceived as the winner of the final
debate with Donald Trump on Thursday night, according to a CNN poll of debate
viewers and a panel of undecided North Carolina voters.
Though the
groups are not representative of actual US voters, they offered a snapshot of
the reaction to the debate, which came just two weeks before election day, as
Trump trails his opponent in national polls and was seeking to reset his appeal
with more moderate Republican supporters.
The CNN
poll found it was perceived as a slightly weaker performance compared to the
first, chaotic presidential debate last month, when 60% of viewers perceived
Biden as the winner, compared to 53% on Thursday night.
Participants
in a CNN panel of undecided North Carolina voters said that Trump’s strength in
the debate was his focus on the economy, while Biden’s strength was his
emphasis on “unifying” Americans.
The CNN
undecided voter panel praised the final debate as “more controlled” and “much
better”. Almost all of the voters on that panel said that Biden won the debate.
But the
takeaways from a focus group of undecided voters assembled by the Los Angeles
Times and pollster Frank Luntz was less positive for Biden.
Words that
the undecided voters in that panel used to describe Biden’s debate performance
included: “vague”, “cognitively impaired”, “I don’t want to say senile, so I’ll
say old”, “uncomfortable”, “grandfatherly”, “defensive”, and “ambiguous”,
Associated Press reporter Jill Colvin tweeted.
Trump was
described by the same group as “controlled”, “constrained”, “petulant”
“reserved”, “surprisingly presidential”, and a “con artist”, Colvin wrote.
A small
group of voters who watched the debate for PBS NewsHour and said the debate
left them feeling “informed.” They praised moderator Kristen Welker, an NBC
White House correspondent. A woman on CNN’s undecided panel also hailed the
debate’s much-touted mute button. “That made a big difference,” she said.
Even on a
day when the United States saw the third-highest total number of new
coronavirus cases, at more than 73,000, according to the Atlantic’s Covid
Tracking Project, some undecided voters shared Trump’s emphasis on keeping
businesses open, whatever the public health cost.
“Like
Donald Trump said, if we shut down the economy at the expense of the people,
there’s not going to be a country to come back to,” one voter on CNN’s
undecided panel said.
As they did
in the first debate, pro-Trump viewers spent a lot of time complaining about
perceived bias of the debate moderator towards Biden, and claiming that Trump
was cut off more often.
“Trump is
doing a good job. Too bad they had to treat Trump like a child by shutting off
his mic. Embarrassing!” one commenter wrote on the Fox News Facebook page
during the debate.
In fact,
Trump had slightly more total speaking time than Biden: just over 41 minutes,
compared with just under 38 minutes for Biden, CNN reported.
Some
viewers found the entire section of the debate on “race”, which centered on
police violence and criminal justice reform, to be frustrating.
“Blackness
and criminality are not the same,” Phillip Atiba Goff, a leading researcher on
racial bias in policing, wrote on Twitter. “Would really love Black communities
to be on the agenda outside of questions about punishment.”
Gene Demby,
the co-host of Code Switch, National Public Radio’s podcast on race and
identity, wrote: “This conversation about race in the US with two rich,
powerful septuagenarians is going about as well as anyone could have
anticipated.”
Demby
highlighted context that Trump’s repeated debate claims about improving
unemployment rates for black Americans lacked. Black unemployment rates have
been roughly twice as high as white unemployment rates for decades, he wrote.
“‘Record low Black unemployment’ is often still at rates we would consider high
or recession-level if we were talking about white folks.”
Pro-Trump
viewers commenting on the Fox News Facebook page wrote that Biden’s comments
about “the talk” black parents have with their children about how to behave
when they are stopped by the police were unconvincing as evidence of the racism
black Americans face. Several of them wrote that they also taught their
children how to be respectful towards the police.
Commenters
on Fox were also unimpressed by the debate question Trump was asked about his
administration’s ongoing failure to reunite 545 migrant children with their
parents after they were separated from their families under the
administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which was widely denounced as a
serious human rights violation.
“If you
don’t want to be separated from your kids don’t try and enter the country
illegally,” one commenter on Fox News’s page wrote.
“Those 525
kids are now on US soil and in the custody of the US … just what their parents
wanted,” another commenter suggested.
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