The Second Debate Probably Didn’t Help Trump, And He Needed Help
The
second presidential debate on Sunday night was a strange one, with Donald Trump appearing to be on the brink of a meltdown in the first 20 to 30 minutes and then steadying himself the rest of the way. But here’s the bottom line: Based on post-debate polls, Hillary Clinton probably ended the night in a better place than she started it. And almost without question, she ended the weekend — counting the debate, the
revelation on Friday of a 2005 tape in which Trump was recorded appearing to condone unwanted sexual contact against women, and the
Republican reaction to the tape — in an improved position.
At times during the past two weeks, but particularly on Saturday afternoon as prominent Republicans were denouncing or unendorsing Trump one after another, it has seemed like Trump’s campaign is experiencing the political equivalent of a stock market crash. By that I mean: There’s some bad news that triggers the crash, and there’s also an element of panic and herd behavior, and it becomes hard to tell exactly which is which. At some point, the market usually finds its footing, as the stock has some fundamental value higher than zero. But it can be a long way down before it does.
At roughly the 20-minute mark of Sunday’s debate — about the point at which Trump
said that he’d appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton and that she’d “be in jail” if someone like him had been president — it seemed prudent to wonder whether Trump’s campaign was over. I don’t mean over in a literal sense (it would be
almost impossible to replace Trump on the ballot). But over in the sense that we knew the outcome of the election for all intents and purposes, to a higher degree of confidence than FiveThirtyEight’s statistical models — which gave Clinton “only” about an
80 percent chance of winning heading into the debate — alone implied. (The polls — and therefore the models — have not yet had time to capture any effect from the Trump tape revelations.)
After all, the past two weeks have gone about as badly as possible for Trump. After having
drawn the race to a fairly close position, Trump took one of the
most lopsided defeats ever at the first debate in New York on Sept. 26. Then he engaged in a weeklong battle with a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, which the Clinton campaign gleefully egged on.
Then the story broke that
Trump had claimed losses of more than $900 million in 1995 and perhaps had
not paid federal income taxes for 18 years.
But wait, there’s more! After a
relatively effective vice presidential debate for Mike Pence earlier in the week — although it didn’t appear to have helped Trump in the
polling — The Washington Post
dropped its story about the tape Friday afternoon. By Saturday, Republican defections were getting bad enough that Trump was
fending off rumors that Pence would quit the race. And then Trump began his Sunday evening at a
makeshift press conference that featured three women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment or sexual assault and a fourth woman who was raped by a man Hillary Clinton represented at trial in 1975. The Bill Clinton sex story might be of interest to Drudge Report readers and parts of Trump’s base, but
most Americans are tired of hearing about it, at least in an election in which Bill Clinton isn’t running for office. And
then in the first 20 minutes of the debate, Trump brought up the Bill Clinton accusations again and threatened to imprison Hillary Clinton, without showing any of the contrition that
Republican leaders were calling for.
But Trump made it through the rest of the debate with a relatively good performance — or at least, so I thought. He was oftentimes meandering but fairly measured, and he was effective at pressing Clinton on Obamacare and her email server, for instance. The key term, however, is “relatively.” I’ve covered enough debates to know that other than in the really obvious cases, it can be hard to judge how voters will perceive a performance. So you grasp on to what you can find:
prediction markets, which began to show Trump rebounding about halfway through the debate; real-time reaction from focus groups; and the sentiment of other journalists.
This inevitably introduces the possibility of groupthink and various other biases, such as judging a candidate’s performance relative “to expectations” (i.e., relative to the media’s expectations, not the voters’ expectations) instead of in any absolute sense. Once expectations were lowered to the point that we in the media were speculating about whether Trump’s own running mate might drop out, any half-decent performance was bound to look good.
It’s not clear that voters judge debates in the same way, however. A
CNN poll of debate watchers found that even though most voters thought Trump exceeded expectations, 57 percent of them nevertheless declared Clinton the winner, compared with 34 percent for Trump. A YouGov
poll of debate watchers showed a much closer outcome, but with Clinton also winning, 47 percent to 42 percent.
These instant-reaction polls
actually do have a correlation with post-debate horse-race polls: The candidate who wins the former usually gains in the latter. Perhaps Clinton’s win was modest enough that this will be an exception, especially given that the sentiments of pundits and television commentators (which
sometimes matter as much as the debate itself) were all over the map.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-second-debate-probably-didnt-help-trump-and-he-needed-help/
Or he could rise & go to 55% too 
