Who won the presidential debate: Prediction markets, analysts and early polls declare Kamala Harris the winner

Minutes after the presidential debate in Philadelphia had ended, the Democratic campaign announced that Kamala Harris was ready for a second debate in October. “Is Donald Trump ready?” Harris campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.

Trump also crowned himself the winner in an unexpected appearance in the spin room, a mixed zone full of journalists. “The polls are very good but beyond the polls, I felt very good, I had a good time doing it,” the former president said, just minutes after the debate. “She wants a second debate because she lost tonight, very badly,” he told journalists, who questioned whether he had made his surprise appearance more because he was nervous about a possible defeat than excited about his claimed victory.

Prediction markets, however, declared Harris the clear winner of the night. Joe Biden’s vice president is leading the odds of winning the November 5 election, according to PredictIt, a New Zealand company that forecasts political and financial events based on stock market movements, which has been cited by Bloomberg and the Financial Times. PredictIt put Harris 10 points ahead, with pricing for a Democrat victory at 56 cents, compared to 48 cents for Trump.

CNN also claims that the Democratic candidate was rated higher by viewers after her performance. “Debate watchers said, 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia,” said a poll of 600 people conducted by SSRS for the news channel. Before the event began, voters were split 50-50 between the two candidates. In 2020 and 2016, the winners of the debates were Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

The debate in Philadelphia has helped Harris achieve one of her main objectives: to introduce herself to U.S. voters. After the debate, the percentage of voters with a favorable opinion of the candidate rose to 45%. Before the standoff, they hovered around 39%, according to CNN. Perceptions of Trump did not change. Thirty-nine percent viewed him favorably and 51% unfavorably, and that remained the same after the debate.

The Trafalgar pollster notes that 55.3% believe the vice president won against Trump (42.5%), while 2.2% said it was a tie. The poll was conducted among 2,200 potential voters in seven swing states. However, the poll does not make it clear whether the debate will boost support for Harris in these states, where both candidates are virtually tied or have advantages within the margins of error. According to Trafalgar, Trump is up 0.8% among these voters, while Harris is up 1.1%.

A focus group organized by The Washington Post with voters in the battleground states also produced similar results. Of the 25 participants, 23 thought that Harris had won the debate. Before the standout, 10 were thinking of voting for Trump. Three hours later, only six considered supporting the Republican.

Journalist Chris Wallace, a veteran broadcaster who has been a news anchor at Fox, NBC, ABC and now CNN, also declared Harris the winner. “I didn’t think I was ever going to witness a debate as devastating as the one [...] in June, where Joe Biden basically tanked his reelection campaign. I think tonight was just as devastating” but for Trump, he said. “She shot him down on almost every subject I can think of, she shot Trump down on abortion, she shot Trump down on January 6 and democracy, she shot him down on national security.”

Ian Bremmer, an analyst at the consulting firm Eurasia, also had no doubts about who triumphed at the debate. “Very clearly, Harris was the winner. This wasn’t as dramatic as the Biden-Trump debate, but it was nonetheless pretty one-sided,” he said in a video. Even conservative analyst Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster, admitted that Trump had a bad night. “Trump has traditionally appealed to Middle America, but he’s given zero answers tonight,” he noted on X.

During his time in the spin room, Trump boasted of polls that declared him the winner of the debate, the only one so far that the candidates have agreed to. The former president claimed that up to 90% of respondents in these surveys named him the victor, but these were X polls created by users such as Robert Griffin III, former Washington Redskins quarterback and American football sportscaster. In another poll posted on Truth Social by Insider Paper, 78% of respondents voted in favor of Trump. The problem is that the poll, with less than 8,000 votes, was only active for 20 minutes. Leading Report, an X account that leans towards Trump, also declared the former president the winner in another poll that is impossible to verify on Elon Musk’s new Twitter.

Donald Trump had more time to speak than Harris. The Republican spoke for 42 minutes and 52 seconds, while his Democratic rival talked for 37 minutes and 36 seconds. Despite the extra five minutes, the former president complained about the moderators and ABC, the network that broadcast the debate. “It basically was three-on-one, and I thought they were very unfair,” Trump said in the spin room. “I assume the moderators would be bad because that right there is the worst of all the news networks, in my opinion.”

Supporters of the former president have also argued he was unfairly treated. “Weird how the hack moderators […] are only ‘Fact checking’ Trump and allowing Kamala to lie nonstop,” Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., posted on Truth Social. The Trump campaign also echoed messages from Fox News presenters, such as Megyn Kelly, who criticized the role of David Muir and Linsey Davis, the journalists who moderated the debate. The campaign, however, had criticized the moderators before the Pennsylvania debate even began.

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