Do debates matter? A million thoughtful commentators used to tell you that they did not, right up until the moment Joe Biden’s face melted off his skull during the first 2024 debate like the bespectacled Nazi at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (“Don’t look at the livestream, Marion!”) So for 2024, at least, I think it’s fair to say that debates matter, especially when there’s only one for the final presidential match-up between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. And in terms of what each candidate desperately needed to accomplish for their campaign, in an election likely to be decided by inches? Kamala Harris narrowly edged the match out.
The narrowness matters but so too does the edge. Tonight we saw one semi-incumbent (Harris) take on another semi-incumbent (Trump), and although I’d rate the final results a rough rhetorical draw — in the poorest possible way on both sides — Harris narrowly won on theater, in a way that the framing of ABC’s debate topics nearly guaranteed. The first half-hour was devoted to abortion politics, which in federal terms is now a dead letter post-Dobbs, but which provided ample fodder for Harris to zoom in on her swing demographic’s key cultural priority. (I don’t doubt that ABC forefronted an issue that ranks near last among the top ten American voters are now concerned about in an effort to help the Harris campaign; I do doubt how much the American swing voter cares at this late exhausted date, unlike some of my colleagues.)
This, however, is not the reason Harris narrowly won. Her victory was rather on the most marginal of style points alone — I’ve seen no evidence that either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is capable of winning on intellectual merits — and only in the narrowest of all possible senses: She probably stopped the bleeding. And she did so by baiting Trump into all of his worst instincts. I’m not even talking about the part of the debate where Trump, predictably, went on a rant about Haitians eating pet dogs in Ohio. Harris was well-advised to goad Trump about Charlottesville and January 6 — although it came late in the night — and while others may have made their peace with the Capitol riots and the election denialism, Trump’s continued refusal to publicly concede he lost in 2020 reminded me of why I’ll be voting for RFK’s severed whale head in November, if at all.
Both sides will insist they won. The media coverage will lean Harris. I think she defended her corner well enough. I do not think the debate altered the trajectory of the race — nothing struck a new tone, only resonated older, well-echoed beats — which, given that we now have two full months of drift left yet to go, cannot help but favor Donald Trump.