State of the Race: Early Signs of a Post-Debate Bounce for Harris

It’s still too soon to judge the fallout from the presidential debate, but the polls already suggest that Kamala Harris might be poised to gain.

The initial surveys of people who watched the debate found that most viewers thought she won, and the candidate deemed the winner in the post-debate surveys usually tends to gain in the polls.

The first few polls taken entirely since Tuesday’s debate show her faring better than polls taken beforehand. If history is any guide, it will still be a few more days — perhaps another week — until the full scope of any post-debate bounce becomes evident.

This time around, there’s another unpredictable element: what the authorities have described as a second attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump. There’s no way of knowing yet how voters might react, but if it refocuses the conversation away from the debate, it could put an early dent in Ms. Harris’s bounce.

Overall, Vice President Harris leads Mr. Trump by three percentage points nationwide, according to The New York Times’s polling average. Already, that’s about a point better for Ms. Harris than our average Wednesday.

The contest is even tighter in the critical battleground states, where no candidate leads by even a single percentage point in enough states to win the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.