Harris obliterates Trump. Will it matter?
Trump shows why he always loses debates
Some quick thoughts on the debate:
Harris clearly obliterated Trump, as even the pundits on Fox admitted. When she ran in 2019-20, she struggled to break through on a crowded debate stage which she had to share with too many other people. But she excelled in the one-on-one format, adopting a prosecutorial tone and seeming to put Trump on trial. She was focused, on-message, and managed to constantly get under Trump’s skin.
It’s not particularly surprising that Harris won. Judging by snap polls and media reaction, Trump has never won a presidential debate, including against Clinton in 2016. He rants, he gets off track, and he trips over his words. He reportedly doesn’t put in any work beforehand, considering holding rallies to be preparation enough. This is clearly a big mistake, and treating the debate like one of his rallies is precisely what leads him to always perform so badly.
If one moment encapsulated the night, it was the question on immigration. This is one of the worst issues for Harris, but instead of focusing on the question she instead said something about how Trump’s rallies are boring and people leave them early. Then, to the collective face-palms of each of his advisors, Trump set off on a rant about his crowd sizes rather than talking about immigration. It was masterful from Harris. Not every moment went that well for her, but many were close.
The part of the night which went best for Trump were the opening sections about the economy. Trump gave fairly effective, simple answers, whereas Harris waffled about the “opportunity economy” and some small-bore policy ideas for small businesses. Trump’s answers were full of mistruths and misunderstandings - such as that foreign countries, not consumers, pay for tariffs - but many people won’t catch that.
But then the moderators stepped in and pointed out that it’s actually consumers who pay for tariffs, and Trump deflated. The moderators in general did a good job of fact-checking Trump live. To my recollection, they didn’t have to correct Harris once, whereas they pointed out numerous false statements that Trump made about abortion, the economy, the 2020 election, and more. Republicans are complaining today that the moderators were biased towards Harris, but I’d give them the same response I always give: if you don’t want to be called out on your lies, don’t nominate a liar.
Harris did really well on abortion. Trump looked visibly unhappy during this segment and tied himself in knots during his answers, trying to own the overturning of Roe without owning its consequences. He also spent far too much time on the lie that babies are “executed” after viable births. He did far too many rally talking points like this in general - things that speak to his base but that are unlikely to win over swing voters. When he says things like “she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison”, only a small segment of the population is nodding along to that; the rest are scratching their heads.
Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity of the night for Trump was that he failed to effectively link Harris to Biden. In fact, the current president of the United States was barely even mentioned save for a comment by Trump about how “we have a president who doesn’t know he’s alive”. The fact Harris was so close to Biden when his mental capacities were failing and yet stood by him is a genuine weak spot for her, and Trump missed out by not exploiting it.
On foreign policy, we didn’t get much new. Harris continued trying to straddle the gap between left and right on the Middle East, and it’s clear that she hopes there will be a ceasefire and the issue will fade. Trump refused to say that he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia, and approvingly cited Viktor Orban’s endorsement. He also seems to think that the Chennault affair was a how-to manual, and keeps claiming that he’ll somehow stop the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East before he even takes office.
As a foreign policy wonk, I thought one of Harris’ smartest attacks was this section on China: “under Donald Trump's presidency he ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military [and] basically sold us out when a policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century. Which means focusing on the details of what that requires…”
This is a very effective attack both on Trump’s China policy specifically and his personality in general. Despite embracing the mantle of the tough-on-China guy, Trump failed to put together a comprehensive policy towards Beijing because he’s not a details-oriented, strategic person. He dismissed Taiwan and Hong Kong’s security fears, said hardly a word about human rights, and even his trade policy consisted of slapdash tariffs rather than targeted sanctions on important parts of the Chinese economy. This is how he approaches everything, and it does little to advance any conception of American interests.
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume that the average voter is going to join all of the dots in that way (which isn’t a dig - most people are not policy wonks because they’re busy living their lives). And I would issue the same word of caution about the debate in general - what I saw or you saw is not necessarily what anyone else saw.
Usually, if you want to know the impact that a debate will have on a race, I would say that it’s most important to look at how the media covers the debate than the debate itself. In that sense, Harris has emerged as the clear winner in the media narrative - even Fox is admitting it. That means that she avoided the worst possible outcome, which was a media narrative about how she bungled the debate and her honeymoon period is over. But it’s not guaranteed that this is going to mean sustained gains in the polls for her - and if it doesn’t, there aren’t many more big moments between now and November to make that movement happen.
Will Trump do another debate? I just got asked that question in a TV interview, and here’s the answer I gave: It depends. Trump has lost every single one of these debates that he has ever done, and he’s not going to expose himself to another beating unless he feels like he has to. So if the polls are still tight in two to four weeks, I think he’ll just gamble that he can coast to victory anyway. But if Harris opens up a more significant lead, he might think it’s a risk worth taking.