CNN’s Axelrod on Biden debate performance: ‘If you’re ahead and you get a draw, you win’

CNN’s David Axelrod said after Thursday night’s presidential debate that Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s standing in the polls against President Trump remains solid, with the former senior Obama adviser arguing that “if you’re ahead and you get a draw, you win.”

“Fundamentally, if you’re ahead and you get a draw, you win,” Axelrod told CNN’s Anderson Cooper when asked for his take on the debate. “And both of them were better than they were last time.”

“But I thought that Joe Biden held his own. And that’s all he had to do,” he continued. “The trajectory of this race did not change.”

Biden currently leads in national and battleground state polls.

A mute button was installed by the Commission on Presidential Debates for the final debate, which seemingly led to more uninterrupted exchanges between Trump and Biden during the 90-minute debate.

Biden currently leads Trump in the RealClearPolitics index of polls by 4.1 percentage points.

In 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton led in the RealClearPolitics average by 3.8 percentage points on Oct. 23 of that year.

Election Day will be Nov. 3, but early voting has already resulted in more than 47 million people casting their ballots as of Friday morning.