Who Won The New Hampshire Democratic Primary Debate?

On Friday, seven candidates faced off in a Manchester, New Hampshire, debate hosted by ABC News. (Note: ABC News owns FiveThirtyEight.) This could be voters’ last look at the candidates before the state casts its votes for a Democratic nominee on Tuesday, and we once again partnered with Ipsos to track how the debate affected likely primary voters’ feelings about the candidates on the stage. The FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, conducted using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, interviews the same group of voters twice, once on either side of the debate, to capture both the “before” and “after” picture.

To better understand which candidates did well or poorly, we plotted how favorably respondents rated the candidates before the debate vs. how debate-watchers rated candidates’ performances afterward — and three candidates stood out according to this metric: Sen. Bernie Sanders, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. In fact, Sanders received the highest marks of any candidate for his debate performance. But Buttigieg and Klobuchar weren’t too far off, and Klobuchar in particular did well, as her debate grade was high relative to her pre-debate favorability rating.