Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a presidential debate with Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at the National Constitution Center, September 10, 2024, in Philadelphia.
Most commentators have concluded that Kamala Harris outperformed Donald Trump last night. She baited him into occasionally going off the rails. She sounded reasonable and well informed compared to Trump’s repeated inventions, lies, and insults.
I’m something of an outlier. I think she might have done a lot better. She’s a learner and could be even stronger next time, if there is a next time.
Trump’s strategy was to dominate. He never missed an opportunity to demand and get the right to respond to Harris. In this fashion, the moderators allowed him a lot more airtime than Harris got. However, a lot of this imbalance was on Harris. She could have insisted on a rejoinder to Trump’s nonsense every time, but seldom did.
It is the image of Trump’s strength, however demented, that appeals to so many of his supporters. And it plays to the sexist stereotype of a woman potential commander in chief as weaker than a man. Harris needed to counter that, by being just as dominant as Trump was, at every opportunity.
Some commentators felt that hanging back and letting Trump impeach himself with bizarre claims was sufficient. But it would have been more effective for her to demonstrate strength by insisting on equal time and using the time to score counterpunches.
Harris did land several, but also missed some. For instance, it fell to one of the moderators, Linsey Davis, to point out that infanticide, contrary to Trump’s claim, is illegal. Harris could have hammered Trump on that: This man believes that a woman’s right to abortion means execution of live babies. He is delusional. Do you want him to have his finger on the nuclear trigger?
When Trump kept attacking Biden and Harris for “never firing anybody,” and bragging about all the people he had fired, Harris might have demanded a response and come back with Who hired all of these incompetent officials whom Donald Trump bravely fired? Donald Trump! We don’t fire a lot of people, because we hire competent people in the first place.
When Trump ducked the moderators’ question about why he had torpedoed a bipartisan plan to secure the border and changed the subject, and the moderators went on to their next scripted question, Harris might have said, Hold on, I need to respond to that. We had legislation for border security early in President Biden’s term, and Donald Trump cynically pressured Republican legislators into killing it. That’s how much he really cares about the security of our border. Did you hear his response? He doesn’t have one.
And when Trump repeated the crazy claim about migrants in Springfield, Ohio, stealing and eating pets, Harris let the moderators fact-check that. She might have insisted on a response: Donald Trump makes stuff up. That’s comical when it comes to fantasies about migrants eating cats and dogs. But what happens to our security when he makes things up, and believes them, about Putin or Netanyahu?
On the whole, the moderators did well. But it was a disgrace that they kept addressing Trump as Mr. President, needlessly enhancing his tattered dignity.
WHO “WON” THE DEBATE, and what difference did it make?
A flash poll of debate watchers conducted for CNN found that by a margin of 63 to 37 percent, they felt that Harris did better. Before the debate, the same viewers were evenly split on which candidate would win. And 96 percent of Harris supporters said Harris had done better, while 69 percent of Trump’s supporters felt he had won.
But drill down deeper and the news is not so great. The percentage of viewers who felt Trump was better on the economy actually widened after they watched the debate. Despite Trump’s exaggerations and lies, debate watchers also gave Trump a 23-point advantage over Harris on whom they trusted to handle immigration. Most tellingly, just 4 percent said the debate had changed their minds about who to vote for.
Harris, in short, narrowly won the debate on points, but it was far from the knockout being claimed. She will need to maximize every opportunity going forward if we are to be spared a second Trump term.
