What Early Polls Say About Who Won the Vice Presidential Debate

On Tuesday night, Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz went head-to-head in the 2024 vice presidential debate – which will also likely be the final debate of the entire presidential election. With that in mind, both parties were perhaps even more hopeful than usual for their candidate to win outright – something that could give their side some momentum heading into the final five weeks of the campaign.

Well, it looks like that didn't happen – polls taken immediately after the debate showed that debate watchers were divided over which candidate won.

According to an average of polls late Tuesday from CNN/SSRS, YouGov/CBS News, Focaldata/Politico and JL Partners/DailyMail.com, 48 percent of debate watchers thought Vance was the winner or had the best performance, compared to 46 percent of debate observers thought that Vance was the winner or performed best. Percent thought that Walz was the winner or performed best.

This is perhaps an unsurprising result after a debate in which both candidates had both strong and weak moments – and neither candidate clearly bombed the way, for example, President Joe Biden did in the presidential debate in June. As a result, it looks like the vast majority of debate watchers have simply retreated to their partisan camps. According to CNN/SSRS, 90 percent of Trump supporters who watched the debate thought Vance won, while 82 percent of Harris supporters who watched thought Walz won.

However, it is worth noting that polls of debate watchers are not necessarily representative of the entire electorate; In fact, both CNN and CBS News found that their selection of debate watchers was skewed Democratic. (It's possible that more Democrats watched the debate because they are more enthusiastic about their vice presidential candidate than Republicans.) So if news (or video clips) of the debate start to reach people who weren't watching, it might Vance better come out and take a look.

Another possible reason there was no clear winner is that both candidates performed well overall. According to the YouGov/CBS News poll, 88 percent of debate watchers felt the tone of the event was “generally positive.” Strong majorities in the poll also said that both Vance (65 percent) and Walz (74 percent) seemed more “reasonable” than “extreme.”

As a result, viewers left the debate with a higher opinion of both candidates. Averaging the CNN/SSRS and YouGov/CBS News polls, Vance's net positivity rating (the share of respondents who said they view him favorably minus the share of respondents who said they view him negatively) rose from -18 percentage points before the debate to just under -1 point after. And Walz's net positivity rating rose from +13 points before the debate to +31 points afterward.

Now, I would recommend taking these numbers seriously, but not literally – that is, Vance and Walz's net favorability ratings could well increase as a result of the debate, but probably not by these specific numbers. As noted, both CNN and CBS News' samples were skewed Democratic, so both polls likely overestimate Walz's popularity and underestimate Vance's. (For comparison, according to the 538 average, Vance's net positivity rating at the start of the debate was just -11 points, while Walz's rating was just +4 points.)

And don't expect either candidate's net favorability rating to jump nearly 20 points. Keep in mind that these polls were aimed only at debate watchers, a small portion of the population. People who didn't watch the debate may not be nearly as inclined to reconsider their views on the candidates. In my debate preview, I found that the average net favorability rating of new, non-incumbent vice presidential candidates changed by an average of 2 points in the two weeks following their debates.

If this pattern continues, both Vance and Walz could become slightly more popular in the next few weeks, but not enough to drastically change their perception.

And overall, it's very unlikely that the vice presidential debate will have any impact on who leads the presidential race. Vice-presidential debates weren't very important anyway: My preview also showed that the last time national polls rose by more than a point immediately after a vice-presidential debate was in 2000. And with early polls showing no clear winner in Tuesday's duel, it's even less likely that this year's debate will make a difference. This is supported by the CNN poll, which found that just 1 percent of debate watchers said the event changed their vote.