Election Countdown, 55 Days to Go: The Debate.
Last night I saw the best presidential-debate performance in my memory. And the worst. Conveniently, I could watch them both at the same time.
A representative split-screen view of how the candidates looked during last night’s confrontation. Kamala Harris looking straight at Donald Trump. Trump avoiding her gaze and looking down. (Photo at a debate-watching party in Charlotte NC, by Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images)
No one can tell us whether the Harris-Trump debate last night will “matter” in electoral terms. For me, it reinforced what I already thought about the two candidates. Maybe everyone will react that way, and we’ll end up with the hair’s-breadth race we’ve heard about all along. Day-after guesses about who “won” or “lost” a debate are notoriously inaccurate as guides to election outcomes. Mitt Romney clearly “beat” a listless Barack Obama in their first debate in 2012, but he did not end up as president. The same was true for John Kerry in his debates with George W. Bush in 2004. So we don’t know what this one will mean.
But here is some of what I saw and noticed during the long session.1
Missions accomplished (Harris) …
Kamala Harris had two main objectives going into this debate. One was to introduce herself to the large portions of the public that, according to polls, said they needed to “learn more about her.” People say that they want to know about her “policies,” but really this curiosity includes her look, her sound, her bearing and manner, her way of presenting issues. Whoever ends up as president is inevitably a figure in Americans’ lives for a number of years. What would it feel like to have her present in our lives that way?
Making this introduction is the task that every “new face” candidate encounters in a debate debut. Think of Jimmy Carter in 1976, an ex-governor of Georgia against incumbent president Gerald Ford. Similarly, Bill Clinton (vs incumbent George H.W. Bush) in 1992, Barack Obama (vs well-known John McCain) in 2008, plus others.
I thought Harris accomplished this mission as well as anyone could have. I was worried for her during the first minute of her very first answer, when she seemed nervous—who wouldn’t be!—and was too obviously giving the answer her team had prepared, rather than responding to what was actually asked. (The question was the classic “are Americans better off than four years ago?” Her answer began with a canned-seeming “I was raised as a middle-class kid.”) But by three or four minutes in she had found her pace and was cruising from that point onward.
Some overnight nit-pick articles (for instance, this Pitchbot-style one from the NYT) complained that voters still needed to hear more details about Harris’s economic and foreign-policy plans. Fine. Programmatic details are not what these debates are for—and anyway, she packed in as many of them as this format could handle. Especially considering that she was shortchanged on speaking time, as Trump over-rode the moderators and insisted on responding to everything that Harris said. Just think how many more details Harris could have laid out in the extra five-plus minutes of talking time available to Trump!
As for introducing not the policies but the person, again she did as good a job as I have seen. Like her or not—I thought she came across well—she used the opportunity to introduce the public to who she is.
Her other mission was to prompt Trump to behave at his worst—to bait or trigger him on his most sensitive points. Oh boy, did she do that. This became evident in the first few minutes, when she criticized his “Trump Tax” tariffs and the program in Project 2025, making Trump splutter in angry response. You could see him melting down on camera when Harris suggested that people actually go to a Trump MAGA rally—where she said they would see small crowds, made of people who were getting bored by same old tired material, and were heading for the exits early.
Small. Old. Tired. Boring. All terms chosen to trigger whatever it is that makes Trump tick. He launched into a rant on “We have the biggest rallies! The most incredible rallies in the history of politics!” [an actual quote] and how all of hers were faked. Harris came in prepared to use those triggering terms again and again – old, weak, tired, boring, people are laughing at him, plus racist and given $400 million by his daddy and then went bankrupt six times. A disgrace. Without fail, every time, she got Trump to go crazy in just the way she planned.
And so it went. I agree with the examples David Frum offered in this assessment, and this by Matt Flegenheimer in the NYT, plus this from Stuart Stevens on Xitter.
-A thought-experiment contrast. Suppose when Trump launched his outrageous “she suddenly turned Black” claim, as he did again last night in response to a question, Harris had gotten mad and spent her next few minutes fuming and refuting. Of course you’d think: She’s lost focus. She’s getting derailed. Why is she so touchy? Those are the reactions Trump invited about himself.
-Another thought experiment, which starts with classifying the audience into various segments. The MAGA base might watch the debate and think: You tell ‘em, Donald! Those encountering his rants and stories for the first time might think: This guy sounds odd. And some people, perhaps without realizing it consciously, might also start thinking: Hmmm, if the Harris campaign can figure out in two months how to push every one of this guy’s buttons, how easy must it be for real pros like Xi or Putin to get him to do whatever they want?
The way he reacted wasn’t worse than at his typical MAGA rally. But it wasn’t any better. The contrast is highlighted if you remember the first 30 minutes of his debate with Joe Biden, during which he was relatively calm, coherent-sounding, and controlled, as Biden was floundering. Trump didn’t manage that for even 30 seconds last night.
… and missions abandoned (Trump).
Why did these outbursts matter? Because they undercut Trump’s paramount strategic goals for the debate, had he been able to think in those terms.
The minor goal was on the body-language-and-dominance level: to make Kamala Harris looked like the one who was on the back foot and out of place. That went out the window with the opening handshake.
The major goal was to present himself as “reasonable” and attractive to people not already within the MAGA base. The people who will vote for him no matter what make up somewhere in the 40% range of the electorate. Enough to keep the election close; not enough to win. To get over the finish line, he needs more people, non-MAGA people. During the first 30 minutes of his RNC speech, he seemed willing to appeal to them. Then it collapsed into a vomitus of grievances and “Sir!” stories. That happened from the very start last night.
He lied: Crime is going up. (It’s going down—he said the FBI was faking the figures.) Inflation is “worst in our nation’s history.” (He was around in the early 1980s when it was much worse.) Democrats support killing babies after they are born. (Come on). He returned to his standard riffs again and again, including his verbatim favorite: “We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” He said he had nothing to do with January 6. He refused point-blank to answer whether Joe Biden had legitimately won the election, or whether he’d sign a national abortion ban, or which side he’s on between Russia and Ukraine. He doesn’t know what “tariff” means. He said that every prosecution against him was a politically motivated fraud.
If you like this, you like it. You’re already in “the base.” But Trump has to attract new people. I find it hard to imagine the viewer who watched this and said: “Immigrants eating pet dogs. That’s an interesting new point! I think I’ll go for Trump.”
Beyond the candidates: What else matters?
Debates always involve participants other than the candidates and their platforms. Body language, moderators, fact-checkers, and more.