The results are in: Actual scientific polls show a big win for Hillary Clinton in the first debate
Four polls - from CNN/ORC, Politico/Morning Consult, NBC/SurveyMonkey, and Public Policy Polling - all showed that respondents felt Clinton bested Donald Trump Monday night at the Hofstra University presidential debate.
In the CNN/ORC instant poll, conducted in the hours after the debate, 62% of respondents said Clinton won, compared with just 27% who said Trump came out on top.
Subsequent polls corroborated the results from CNN/ORC's immediate survey.
In Tuesday's Politico/Morning Consult poll, 49% of registered voters thought Clinton won the debate, compared with just 26% who felt Trump came out on top.
A Wednesday NBC/SurveyMonkey poll found that 52% of likely voters thought Clinton won on Monday, with only 21% selecting Trump, and a larger portion, 26%, selecting neither.
And a Thursday poll from left-leaning Public Policy Polling showed Clinton edge Trump by a 54% to 31% margin.
Clinton has experienced a slight bump from her well-received performance. In a head-to-head matchup, Clinton expanded her lead over Trump from 2.3% on Monday to 3% by Thursday.
Before the slew of scientific polls was released, Trump touted unscientific online polls. Such polls, almost always dismissed by professional pollsters and analysts, are not accurate because the sample is comprised of self-selecting participants and does not reflect the electorate.
Fox News Sean Hannity and some of his colleagues, nevertheless, helped fuel Trump's narrative by also citing such unscientific online polls, ultimately resulting in a network executive sending staff a memo reminding them that online polls "do not meet ... editorial standards."