Democrats believe Harris goaded Trump into veering off message and kept him on the defensive for most of the 90-minute debate.
Two months ago, Republicans gathered for their mid-July convention in Milwaukee were confident that Donald Trump had it in the bag. Turns out that euphoria was a bit premature now that their 2024 nominee has a new opponent.
Inside the spin room immediately after the debate, Republican campaign surrogates in Philadelphia characterized the debate a three-on-one showdown, laying into the moderators for asking unfair questions of Trump while constantly fact-checking the former president and not Vice President Kamala Harris.
“It was three-on-one. They continued to engage in so-called fact-checking of Donald Trump. They never did that to Kamala Harris,” Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) told reporters.
Trump concurred, posting on social media just 40 minutes after the debate ended, “I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!”
The moderators did repeatedly fact check Trump’s statements, including when he claimed Democrats were in favor of “executing” babies after birth. Trump was referring to a statement made by then-Virginia governor Ralph Northam in 2019 in which he explained the parameters of a bill then pending before the state legislature that would have expanded abortion access in the final trimester, up to and including allowing doctors to withhold life-saving care from babies deemed “non-viable.”
But as many conservative commentators underscored Tuesday evening, a nimble candidate knows how to pivot and go on offense — rather than allowing himself to be pushed by moderators into using precious floor time adjudicating the veracity of narrow claims. And now nearly a decade into his political career, many argued, this former president should be no stranger to unfair moderators.
Democrats, meanwhile, are thrilled with their new nominee’s performance. Harris delivered what they believe was a strong debate performance onstage Tuesday evening that successfully goaded Trump into veering off message and staying on the defensive for most of the 90 minutes – even though he is not the incumbent.
The former president and his team like to say that he doesn’t prepare for debates because he doesn’t need to. While it’s true that he eschews traditional debate prep, he typically engages in informal grill sessions with aides and lawmakers instead. Harris, by contrast, spent the past few days undergoing intense debate prep inside a Pittsburgh hotel – complete with a makeshift stage and a red-tie sporting Trump impersonator.
Harris’s preparedness Tuesday evening was evident the moment she walked onstage. Meeting her opponent for the first time face to face, she took the initiative to walk up to him to shake his hand and introduce herself by name. Her approach seemed to catch Trump off guard.
Much like her convention speech last month in Chicago, Harris accomplished what she and her team wanted by making the case that her opponent is only out for himself. She may not have knocked every answer out of the park, but she stayed on message, came across as normal, and got under Trump’s skin. Her split-screen facial expressions and head-shakes were distracting at times, but she also did not talk in circles like she has in the past when off script – an important success given this is the only debate currently on the calendar.
Harris’s calm demeanor took attention away from her less-than-stellar answers, like when she dodged Trump’s question on whether she believes abortion should be legal in the third trimester, and erroneously claimed that “as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.” She repeatedly said that Trump “has no plan for you” – a bold claim for a candidate who pointedly declined to distinguish herself from Biden throughout the debate, and who waited until this week to roll out an issues section on her campaign website.
Trump, meanwhile, came across as unfocused and as having vastly underestimated his opponent. Even though he didn’t lose his cool the way some Republicans had feared, he refused to look at her for most of the debate and veered off on tangents that didn’t deliver the knockout blows Republicans had desperately craved.
He put points on the board at times by hitting Harris on immigration, poking fun the Biden-Harris administration for “never” firing anybody (even after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal), and hammering her in his closing statement for not effectively addressing the problems she identified onstage while in office. “She’s going to do this, she’s going to do that, she’s going to do all these wonderful things,” he told the audience in his closing statement. “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and a half years. They’ve had three and half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and half years to create jobs.” He called her a “Marxist” and told viewers that “she is Biden.”
With eight weeks to go until Election Day, it’s a mistake to say that the race is over. Nothing last night came close to the catastrophic performance Biden delivered on June 27, and polls continue to suggest that the race is a dead heat.
During an unexpected appearance inside the spin room, Trump characterized his onstage performance as his best debate performance to date. “I thought it was a great night,” he said. Addressing the Harris campaign’s post-debate request for a second standoff, he left voters hanging: “She wants to do another one because she got beaten tonight,” he said. “We’ll think about it.”