Very few debates have as crystal-clear a loser as the Trump–Biden debate in June. This wasn’t one of them. The moderators were bad and biased in Harris’s favor, and I suppose you could deploy the old saw that the side complaining about the moderators is who lost, but that’s just standard by now.
Given my metric from this morning — that the winner is whichever candidate the debate isn’t about — this was probably a narrow win for Kamala Harris. She escaped a detailed examination of her record or a detailed elaboration of her plans. She didn’t pratfall trying to explain herself.
But then, Donald Trump spent a lot of time contrasting his record with the Biden-Harris record, and Harris did nothing at all to distinguish herself from Biden. When she finally broke out in frustration to remind Trump that he wasn’t running against Biden and that she represented a “new generation,” she then missed her one last chance to explain in any way how she’s a real rather than cosmetic change from Biden.
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. At least he wasn’t the rambling Trump of the weeks after his assassination attempt (which he tried, without any basis, to blame on Democrats). But if you had any illusions of getting a Trump chastened by mortality or wiser from experience, you were bound to be disappointed. There’s only one Donald Trump, and you’re not getting a new one.
Frankly, the big question remains: what do voters think of Harris? We know what they think of Trump. Trump was fairly effective tonight in arguing that Harris was four more years of Joe Biden. He was too rambly to pin on her — against the resistance of the moderators — her prior record. But she failed to define herself. If the voters buy what the media is selling them about Harris, the Trump campaign will look back on tonight as a lost opportunity to substitute their own portrait of the vice president. If voters conclude that she’s just four more years of the same, however, it’s the Harris campaign that will regret tonight.