Donald Trump was the unquestionable winner of the debate, according to online polls

Donald Trump
(Image credit: Pool/Getty Images)

Frank Luntz's respected focus group polling deemed Marco Rubio the winner of Thursday night's debate, but it was a different story online. While such surveys have a tendency to be highly unscientific and only roughly accurate, they are a great gauge of the general temperature of how a candidate went over. Rather unsurprisingly at this point, Donald Trump was a big hit.

In a Drudge Report survey of more than 120,000 people, 63.8 percent of respondents named Trump the winner. Ted Cruz trailed at 17.9 percent, Marco Rubio at 12.8 percent, John Kasich at 3.6 percent, and why-is-he-still-running Ben Carson came in with 2 percent.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.