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President Trump didn’t make himself more appealing to voters during the Republican National Convention, but he did hurt Joe Biden, a new Axios-SurveyMonkey poll finds.

Why it matters: Trump dedicated much of his convention messaging to trying to try scare voters about Biden, charging that he'd allow leftist radicals to drive Democrats' agenda and urban protesters to unravel the suburbs.

  • Biden's favorable/unfavorable rating with independents who don't lean toward either party dropped from a net -5 to -18 in a week.
  • But Trump's also eroded — and remained far worse than Biden's — sliding from -35 to -37.

By the numbers: Trump's favorability is now at 89% among Republicans, just barely down from 91% last week; Vice President Mike Pence's is unchanged, at 82%.

  • Biden's favorability is at 85% among Democrats, unchanged from a week ago; Harris' is up just barely, to 79%.
  • Trump holds the lowest net favorable/unfavorable rating of the four among overall respondents (-11), compared with Pence (-6), Biden (-5) and Harris (-3).
  • But Biden's unfavorable rating has gotten worse — it was -2 a week ago.
  • Trump didn't improve his support among Black Americans: nearly two thirds have strongly unfavorable views of him, even though the convention showcased several Black speakers who defended him from charges of racism and highlighted his adoption of criminal justice reforms.
  • He made no progress among Hispanics.

A pair of word clouds from the polling provides a snapshot of America's mood. The top three words Republicans used to describe their convention were "patriotic," "inspiring" and "uplifting":

Graphic: SurveyMonkey

Democrats' top words for the RNC were "lies," "Trump" and "fear":

Graphic: SurveyMonkey

The big picture: "Looking narrowly, the convention worked to boost the sense of unity among the most conservative Republicans," said SurveyMonkey's Jon Cohen. But the survey shows "fresh evidence of the seesaw-like opinions of those who see themselves as independents and don’t lean to either party — views that could determine the outcome."

  • 27% of Republicans preferred the largely virtual convention format to a traditional in-person convention week, compared with 18% who thought it was worse; more than half said it was about the same.
  • 60% of Republicans say their party is unified now, up from 51% a week ago.

What we're watching: The survey found slight increases from a week before among Republicans, independents and even Democrats who now say they intend to vote in person this year despite the pandemic — though more than half of Democrats still plan to vote by mail.

  • And it's important to watch whether voters' views of Trump and Biden harden in the coming weeks, Cohen said — because "a fierce contest between two unpopular candidates foreshadows 2016."

Methodology: This SurveyMonkey online poll was conducted August 27-28, 2020 among a national sample of 2,922 adults in the U.S. Respondents for this survey were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day.

  • The modeled error estimate for this survey is +/- 2.5 percentage points. Data have been weighted for age, race, sex, education, and geography using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States age 18 and over.

Go deeper:

Axios-SurveyMonkey poll: The Biden-Harris bounce

Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times

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Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.

Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.

The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.

  • The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.

What the transcripts say:

  • Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
  • The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
  • Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."

Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.