Conventional wisdom holds that the first presidential debate offers an especially good opportunity for the challenging candidate, who for the first time gets to stand on a literal public stage, and a proverbial level playing field, with the incumbent president.
As much as we like to debunk the conventional wisdom at FiveThirtyEight, this hypothesis has the ring of empirical truth to it. [cont.]
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight
Presidential trial heats: