“Instead of clearing them, Trump tripped over his own hurdles,” said one frustrated Republican strategist after the debate. “He got tired of acting presidential and he showed little command of issues, outside of trade. To be fair to Trump, Clinton did not have to answer any hard questions about her own record, so you have to figure in the next debate the moderator will try to even the scales.”

Many Trump supporters view his lack of conventional political credentials, and his unpredictable nature, as an asset: proof that he’s an agent of change who will disrupt a political system they view as ineffective and tilted against them. But beyond his base, doubts about Trump’s ability to handle the presidency—particularly the responsibilities of commander in chief—have been a persistent headwind for him.

Across multiple surveys before the debate, roughly 60 percent of Americans said they did not consider Trump qualified to be president. An instant post-debate poll conducted by CNN/ORC showed that Trump failed to make any meaningful progress in reducing that number. In the survey, just 43 percent of those polled said that, based on Trump’s performance in the debate, he could “handle the job of president if he is elected.” A solid majority of 55 percent said he could not. By contrast, 67 percent of those surveyed said Clinton could handle the job, while just 32 percent said she could not. By 68 percent to 27 percent, those surveyed also said Clinton had demonstrated a better command of issues. Although CNN acknowledged its sample leaned excessively toward Democrats—which may itself reflect a statement about which side felt good enough about the debate to respond to polls about it—those remained decisive advantages.

Doubts about Trump’s qualifications loom as a particular obstacle for him with college-educated white voters. The principal reason Trump has struggled to grow his support much beyond 40 percent is that he is facing unprecedented resistance with those white-collar whites: The national surveys released over the past week by NBC/Wall Street Journal, ABC/The Washington Post, Bloomberg Politics, and Marist/McClatchy all showed Clinton leading Trump among college-educated whites. No Republican nominee in the history of polling dating back to 1952 has lost those well-educated whites.

Few goals rank higher for Democrats than preventing Trump from recovering with those voters; just before the debate, longtime Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, the campaign manager for Howard Dean in 2004, said, “Isn’t that the whole thing for tonight? If you can preserve that [as Clinton], you win. Or if you can make that happen [as Trump], you win.”

The full answer to the debate’s impact won’t be apparent until more detailed surveys weigh in. But the instant CNN poll—and the reaction from strategists on both sides watching the candidates’ performances—suggested the encounter mostly reinforced the white-collar doubts about Trump. While 68 percent of college whites in the post-debate CNN survey said Clinton was qualified to be president, 57 percent said Trump was not. Two-thirds of them picked Clinton when asked which candidate had shown the greatest mastery of the issues.