by Darren Janz
Monday night has come and gone, and the first general election debate of the 2016 presidential election is now over. As always, of course, only one big question now remains - who won? The answer to that is... complicated. While online polls conducted the night of the debate by organizations like The Washington Times, CNBC, and the Drudge Report suggest that Trump was victorious by wide margins, the validity of those polls is disputed, especially considering they were not conducted in a scientific manner and online polls generally don't have that good of a track record when it comes to accuracy. In fact, scientific polls conducted since the debate by CNN/ORC, HuffPost/YouGov, and NBC News/SurveyMonkey suggest just the opposite of their online counterparts, with all three saying that Clinton won the first debate over Trump by a margin of about 30%. With political pundits and all sorts of pollsters divided over who proved to be the winner of Monday night's showdown, we've figured that providing a bit of insight on our own couldn't hurt. By far the most evident result of Monday night was Clinton's apparent ability to provoke Trump into losing his composure on the debate stage. Throughout the evening, Clinton constantly tried to prod Trump into foregoing his self-control, essentially baiting him into controversy as he tried to repel her allegations and attacks. The most notable example of this occurred when Clinton criticized Trump for failing to pay federal taxes, resulting in Trump saying that doing so "makes [him] smart" instead of refuting the allegations or changing the topic altogether. Clinton also baited Trump into denying claims he has made in the past, with Trump saying he "did not say" global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese despite having put the statement on his Twitter in late 2012. While Trump did appear to have succumbed to many of the attacks and provocations made by Clinton throughout the course of the debate, a number of of his policy-related arguments did seem to be quite successful with the audience. Over the course of the night, Trump hammered Clinton for her record on the economy and foreign trade, accusing her of supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a number of other trade deals that he has attacked throughout the campaign as unfair to the American working class. Despite Clinton's denial of Trump's claims, his attacks on her record may prove to be successful in winning voters over, with even CNN's post-debate poll suggesting that the public is tightly split between the two candidates when it comes to the economy. Overall, the debate - as expected - contained good and bad moments for both candidates, with Clinton's provocations of Trump's composure and Trump's attacks on Clinton's record making for what very well could have been the most fiery debate in contemporary American political history. Ultimately, both candidates likely retained their base of supporters and gained few new followers, and we may just have to wait until the second contest on October 9th in order to determine who really will take the debates home.
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