September 20 , 2024
Harris clearly wanted the opportunity to speak to a massive national audience, one that would include a number of voters who were undecided. Trump knew that he was losing by a small amount and saw the debate as an opportunity to reverse the direction of the campaign
Harris Trounces Trump in Debate
Vice-President Kamala Harris met Donald Trump in their first and likely only debate on September 10. I was surprised Trump went ahead with this, as it was highly likely he would lose. But Trump suffers from narcissistic overconfidence and couldn’t help himself. He was certain that just like he beat Biden in June, he would beat Harris now and return the campaign dynamics in his favor. That was a huge blunder.
In the seven weeks since Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, Harris has run a flawless campaign. She has held many massive rallies, spoken well on the stump, and avoided any unforced errors. The pick of Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, has also turned out to be a solid choice. Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of Pennsylvania was thought by many to be the best pick, given how critical Pennsylvania is to the election, but Walz plays well in the entire Midwest, including other swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin.
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago came off without a hitch and provided a boost to the campaign. Fears of mass protests by those angry over the war in Gaza failed to materialize, as the actual number of protestors was minimal and did not disrupt the convention. Fundraising has been off the charts, with Harris raising 360 million dollars in August alone, almost three times what Trump raised. The grassroots enthusiasm also has shown up in the massive number of volunteers who want to work for the Harris campaign. Given all that, the momentum going into the debate was already on Harris’s side, with national polls giving her an average of 2-3 point lead.
But that lead is not enough to win. Clinton won by 2 points in 2016 but lost the election because she barely lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan by a tiny margin of votes, less than 1% in each in state. Because the President is elected state by state, a small national lead does not guarantee victory. Biden won by 4 points in 2020, but he won the critical states of Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia by tiny margins that could have easily tipped the opposite direction. For a Democrat to feel confident, Harris needs to win by 4-5 points.
This brought us to the debate. Harris clearly wanted the opportunity to speak to a massive national audience, one that would include a number of voters who were undecided. Trump knew that he was losing by a small amount and saw the debate as an opportunity to reverse the direction of the campaign.
The debate itself turned into a disaster for Trump. He came off as rather unhinged, giving bizarre answers to questions and making wild accusations. He insisted that he actually won the 2020 election. He denied that he said there were “good people on both sides” about the neo-Nazi rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 where protestors clashed. He claimed that if Harris got elected, Israel would cease to exist within two years. He admitted that after nine years of proclaiming his desire to replace the ACA (Obamacare), he didn’t have even the outline of a plan, but did claim to have the “concept” of a plan, which of course he declined to share with the audience. He repeatedly claimed the immigrants were destroying America and that he needed to be President to close the border. He repeated a right-wing meme that legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. On the topic of abortion, he refused to say whether he would sign a national ban on abortion but falsely claimed that everyone in America, Democrats, and Republicans alike, wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, and he was proud to have appointed the judges to the Supreme Court that made that happen. He went on to state that in some states babies can be killed after birth.
The ABC moderators did push back on some of Trump’s lies. They pointed out that in no state can babies be murdered after being born. That Haitian immigrants are not eating cats and dogs. That he did in fact lose the 2020 election. And that, unlike his claim that crime is skyrocketing, it is actually going down. In fact, the murder rate in 2024 looks like the lowest since the early 1960s.
Harris for the most part attacked Trump, rather than spending a lot of time on what she plans to do in the White House. She did state her goal of making abortion legal nationwide again. She also touted her plans to help small businesses and first-time homebuyers with tax credits. She stated that she would sign the border bill that Republicans had backed just a few months ago, only to abandon their support at the direction of Trump, who wanted immigration to be an issue he could use in his campaign. She effectively used the large number of Republicans, including senior retired generals who served in the Trump White House, to attack Trump as a “disgrace”.
Despite the campaign rules, Trump blustered and talked over Harris at times. He got about five minutes more speaking time than Harris did in total and succeeded in somehow getting in the last word on almost every issue they discussed. But in the process, he came off as deranged and out of control. He did himself no favors with moderate and undecided voters. Though his base ensures that he will win 45% of the vote in November, that still leaves 55% for Harris to go after. 1-2% will vote third party, but if Harris can bring the remainder together and motivate them to actually come out and vote, she could win a very large 7 or 8-point win. In the modern context, that would be a landslide, on par with the Obama win in 2008. It would sweep in a Democratic majority in the House and might be enough to keep the Senate in Democratic hands despite a very unfavorable map with highly vulnerable seats being defended in Ohio and Montana, and a West Virginia seat which they are sure to lose. A massive Harris win could bring Senate victories in Florida and possibly Texas while allowing the Democrats to hold on elsewhere.
