Former United States president, Donald Trump’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris may have gone either way but there is no guarantee that debate victories will translate into election wins, CNN reports.
It often takes days or weeks for a presidential debate to percolate deep into the electorate and for enduring impressions to settle.
Candidates who triumph on the debate stage don’t always win the election. Both Trump in 2016 and President George W. Bush in 2004 were judged to have lost debates but went on to win the White House.
And while Democrats were euphoric after Harris’ performance, partisans often judge a debate based on their own political preferences.
Even if he loses ground after the debate, Trump has long had the advantage on the top two issues in the election – the economy and immigration. With many voters still awaiting the benefits of the post-pandemic economic rebound, it’s not certain that any debate will be a decisive factor in their vote.
And Trump’s dark messages on immigration and crime might be hyperbolic, but they’ve proved to be potent in the past. There’s also always the chance that shock events at home or abroad in the next two months could tip the balance.
While it’s too early to say whether Harris’ strong performance will translate into new momentum, her campaign will be optimistic that she’s improved her chances among, perhaps, 200,000 movable voters who will decide the next election in a handful of states.
Harris wasted no time checking off her goals Tuesday night.
She directly addressed viewers at home, promising to alleviate the burdens of working Americans struggling with high grocery and housing prices. She goaded Trump over his crowd sizes and called him weak. And, amazingly, he walked into the trap every single time, with angry outbursts that fueled her claims that he’s unfit for a new term and that the country has a fleeting chance to move on from his bitter chaos. Her deep preparation paid off as she avoided campaign-threatening errors.
Most fundamentally, Harris validated the decision of Democrats to ditch Biden as their nominee, performing the forensic dismantling of Trump’s character, policies and legacy that was beyond the president in his disastrous June debate that ended his reelection campaign.
Taylor Swift, whose megastar endorsement the Trump team erroneously claimed last month via the use of AI, apparently thought so too, declaring as soon as the debate ended, “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
When Trump got agitated, Harris didn’t respond in kind but laughed and several times rested her chin on her hand. The second time she did this, it seemed contrived, but the gesture could become an iconic emblem of the debate on social media.
When she tweaked Trump on his obsession with rallies, he unaccountably gave her a pass on one of her most vulnerable issues – the southern border. “First, let me respond as to the rallies,” Trump said. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
It was a classic example of how Harris repeatedly used perceived flaws in Trump’s character to give him the space to undermine his own debate performance.
The ex-president’s inability to resist the bait constantly dangled in front of him meant that the most fearsome political performer of modern times spent the evening being more self-destructive than destructive to his opponent. This was never clearer than when he repeated a racist slander about Haitian immigrants eating pets – that even his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, acknowledged Tuesday might not be true. Harris, after seeing her opponent confirm her accusations about his extremism, just shook her head.
After refusing to be drawn into Trump’s attempts to make the election a referendum on her race and gender, the vice president offered a far more direct repudiation of her opponent Tuesday. She raised his past demands for the execution of the Central Park Five and his lies about President Barack Obama’s birthplace, as she painted him as a force of division who sought to exploit America’s deepest historic wounds for his own gain. “I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone, who wants to be president, who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people,” she said.
Harris’ performance was not perfect. She dodged answering her very first question – the classic consideration of whether voters are better off now than they were four years ago. She also did not directly say whether she regretted the deaths of 13 American service personnel killed in 2021 in the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan whose deaths have become a centerpiece of the Trump campaign. But even her evasions showed how she’s become a more effective political performer as she pivoted into her talking points and Trump was unable to effectively cross-examine her.
Trump did not make his own best case
Trump’s inability to focus on a consistent attack against Harris or put aside her transparent efforts to distract him confirmed the fears of many Republicans disappointed in his failure so far to effectively deal with his new opponent.
Ironically, Trump suffered from the same deficit that plagued Biden in their debate in June– he couldn’t pin his opponent down and was unable to voice a strong blueprint for the future.
