Last week's convention boosted the Biden-Harris ticket with Democrats and some independents — while the four-day, largely virtual show also intensified Republican opposition, a new Axios-SurveyMonkey poll shows.
The big picture: "Hopeful," 'inclusive" and "united" were the top three words Democrats used to describe this year's Democratic National Convention. Republicans said: "Boring," "lies" and "joke."
Democrats
Republicans
Where it stands: Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris each got five-point bumps with Democrats coming out of the convention, compared with our survey a week earlier. (Biden's favorability is now at 85% among Democrats, and Harris' is at 77%.)
- Biden's net favorability with independents is still shaky, at -6 percentage points — but that's an improvement from -20 before the convention.
- Harris became a more familiar figure to American households over the course of the convention, but that didn't move her ratings with independents.
- Republicans' negative views of both intensified, with Biden coming out of the convention with a 89% unfavorable GOP rating and Harris with 82% unfavorable.
By the numbers: 55% of Democrats now say their party is united (+5 percentage points from a week earlier.)
- The biggest shift came among self-described “moderate” Democrats, 63% of whom now say the party is united (+9).
- Seven in 10 Democrats who tuned into the convention saw the party as unified.
- "Very liberal" Democrats remain the least convinced the party can unify, with 31% predicting they'll still be divided in November.
What they're saying: "In early returns, the Democrats got what they were after," said SurveyMonkey chief research officer Jon Cohen.
More than half of Democrats (52%) said they have a more favorable view of the Democratic Party after the convention, while 42% said their view didn't change. Only 5% had a less favorable view.
- Two-thirds of Republicans said they had a less favorable view.
- Two-thirds of independents said their view was unchanged, while it was a net negative (-9 percentage points) among independents who changed their views.
The intrigue: The coronavirus forced convention organizers to adopt more virtual events, and this survey gives us some early measure of how that played.
- 48% Democrats say they watched all or part of the convention this year, while another 34% kept up with the coverage.
- 44% of both groups combined preferred the virtual formal to the typical in-person conventions, while 12% preferred the traditional format; 42% thought they were about the same.
Methodology: This SurveyMonkey online poll was conducted August 20-21, 2020 among a national sample of 2,946 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 +/- 3.0 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.
