Republicans Didn’t Think They Were Asking Too Much of Trump in the Debate — They Were Wrong

Only yesterday, Democrats were crossing their fingers in pre-debate interviews with National Review in hopes that their nominee wouldn’t botch one of her only unscripted prime-time events as a candidate this close to Election Day. As Representative Jim McGovern (D., Mass.) put it in dramatic terms a few hours before Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage: “She needs to win. That’s the bottom line.”

The same Democrats who spent the hours leading up to ABC’s 9 p.m. debate glued to their television screens breathed a sigh of relief the moment Harris walked onstage. In their view, she immediately took command of the room by taking the initiative to approach Trump, shake his hand, and introduce herself by name. The next 90 minutes saw a well-prepared, if nervous, Harris take on a rambling, emotional Trump. Harris at times sounded robotic in repeating practiced remarks about her policy plans and attacks against her opponent, while Trump veered off on conspiratorial rants and went viral for answering a question about his plans to replace Obamacare by saying he has “concepts of a plan.”

But this race is still a coin flip, and it’s far from clear that last night’s 90 minutes of sparring will impact the electoral map.

A RealClearPolitics polling average from surveys in seven key battleground states finds a tight race, with Harris and Trump essentially tied. Pressed on why the contest remains so close, Democrats say the race was always going to be tight and point to the massive gains Harris has made as compared with her boss in the weeks since she succeeded him as the nominee.

“Anytime you have an opponent, you’re nervous. We know this is going to be a nail biter,” Representative Joyce Beatty (D., Ohio) told NR Tuesday afternoon. She pointed to the spread of polling points that Harris has gained “in such a short window,” since late July. “The spread in swing states that she’s either tied or up by one or two gives us enough hope. But we also realize it’s only 50-some days to go before the election. And so that’s why we have to get the message out — we have to get people off to vote. If people vote we win.”

A lot of Democrats were surprised about “how big that initial pre-convention bump was,” says Representative Dean Phillips, the Minnesota Democrat who briefly challenged Biden for the presidential nomination. Even as the race remains a dead heat, “I don’t hear any sense of panic or surprise” from fellow Democrats, he told NR a few hours before the debate. “And of course, it’s all relative, because compared to Biden, now we have a real race.”

As NR’s Noah Rothman writes, Harris’s main job for the night was not to attack Trump but to introduce herself to voters. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that about one-third of voters nationwide don’t think they know enough about Harris, a trend that’s particularly pronounced in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

Meanwhile Trump’s job was to argue that the country will be better off under a second Trump administration. Earlier Tuesday, inside the U.S. Capitol, Republican lawmakers were hopeful that Trump could effectively hammer Harris and ask viewers whether they are better off now than they were under his administration before the pandemic.

“All the merits of the case are his side in terms of which policies really work,” Senator Mike Braun (R., Ind.) told NR Tuesday afternoon. “As long as he stays on point” and effectively prosecutes the argument that the economy was much better under his watch “pre-Covid,” he said, “there’s no way she can make a case against that.”

Like Braun, Representative Cory Mills (R., Fla.) had high hopes Tuesday afternoon that his nominee had the upper hand going into the debate. “It’s very easy to go ahead and pin this on them, and what the failures have been.” He referenced “the inflationary rage, the economic turmoil, the world on fire,” and “the pattern of abandonment” that has occurred under the Biden administration as easy points to score in the debate. “And so I think that if Trump just literally sticks to” invoking the old Reagan line — are you better off now than you were four years ago? — “I think that that’s a great model for him to follow.”

Apparently that was too much to ask. Trump put some points on the board, especially during his closing statement. “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and a half years. They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs.” But for much of the debate, he took Harris’s bait, was on the defensive, and came across as unfocused, undisciplined, and unprepared.

“What Donald Trump needed to do, and he really wasn’t successful at doing, was deliver the message that she was responsible for the inflation, the economy, chaos on the border, and any plans that she has now, she should have enacted three and a half years ago,” says Republican strategist Jeanette Hoffman. “He did make that statement in his closing remarks, but he failed to deliver it throughout the remaining debate. And he took the bait of every attack that she delivered.”

And what of the moderators? In the spin room Tuesday evening, Republican surrogates — and even Trump himself — made the case that the evening was a three-on-one sparring session that baked the cake for Harris as soon as the clock started. 

As NR reported earlier today, a disciplined GOP candidate knows how to pivot and go on offense even when the deck is stacked against him. “Part of being a Republican is knowing that the refs will never be on your side,” says Republican strategist Liam Donovan. “That’s simply no excuse for Trump’s failure to lay a glove on Harris. Recall that within 20 minutes he was interrupting immigration-minded moderators to mount a passionate defense of his crowd sizes.”

“This was a night with ample opportunity that was totally squandered,” Donovan added. “Not by the moderators, not by the prep team, but by the self-indulgence of an undisciplined candidate.”

Around NR

• NR’s editors declare Kamala Harris the victor of last night’s debate — with an assist from ABC News moderators:

But nobody forced Trump to go down the many blind alleys he took. He didn’t have to defend the January 6 rioters, claim that he won in 2020, or get in a dispute about crowd sizes — or, for that matter, name-check Sean Hannity and Viktor Orbán as fans of his. Anyone cheered by those comments is already an active supporter of Trump.

• Dan McLaughlin similarly suggests the debate was probably a narrow win for Harris: 

Trump, for his part, was vigorous but angry and belligerent. He probably won not a single new vote, but he reminded people who are already committed for or against him why they are. He was the same old Trump.

• Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was completely wrong to say that there are no Americans in combat zones today, says a fact-check from Mark Antonio Wright:

Several hundred Americans are in Syria. More are in Iraq. These Americans regularly come under fire by Iranian-backed militants and conduct offensive operations against ISIS and other Islamist groups.

• Andrew C. McCarthy argues that anyone obsessing over how bad the moderators were doesn’t “want to come to grips with the brute fact that Donald Trump was a disaster last night”: 

You know who cares about the notorious bias of the media-Democrat complex? Conservatives. You know who was not the relevant, target audience for last night’s debate between presidential candidates? Conservatives.

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