2020 presidential debate
Who won the debate? Early polls say Joe Biden.
Early polls show that Democratic nominee Joe Biden was the runaway winner of the first presidential debate, with CNN's survey showing a full 60 percent of Americans believe he won the night, compared to 28 percent who believe President Trump did — a two-to-one margin.
Other polls were a little tighter, with a CBS News poll of battleground states finding that 48 percent of debate watchers believed Biden won, compared to 41 percent who thought Trump did and 10 percent who thought it was a tie.
"There was no winner, certainly not the United States," wrote Nate Cohn of The New York Times. "And that makes Biden the winner. He's the frontrunner. It's Trump who needed the win, and I think most anyone would agree, as Chris Wallace said, that the president was largely responsible for the debate."
Trump trails Biden in RealClearPolitics' average of polls by 6.1 percent.