Debate Wrap
The GP/BP gang on a skilled vice-president and a not-so-skilled.......former president.
Once again, all three of us are here for post-debate analysis. Enjoy!
[Julia:]
I think I had three major takeaways from this debate:
1. Harris is very effective at shifting the terrain of the debate and forcing her opponent into a corner, where they have to respond in ways they don’t want to. She forced Trump into saying he didn’t support a national abortion ban and into talking about Putin, the latter of which is particularly divisive in his own party.
2. There was a lot of talk beforehand about Harris needing to define herself for the American people. She did talk some about herself, her background and her plans moving forward. But she was able to do this while also putting Trump on the defensive and putting his record and flaws on display, which seems to be where the Democratic ticket has had the advantage. It was a tough balance to strike and I think she did it.
3. Taking a longer view, this debate really highlighted what Trump has done to American democracy, especially presidential politics. There were serious issues to be discussed. There are real questions about why the Afghanistan withdrawal went as badly as it did, for (just one) example. Instead, the standard bearer of one party talked about eating pets, post-birth abortions, and, of course, crowd sizes.
[David:]
Prosecutors and journalists both spend a lot of time thinking about how to get people to answer questions. Kamala Harris is a very experienced prosecutor; David Muir and Linsey Davis are very experienced journalists. They cracked Trump pretty good.
For Harris—as candidate and prosecutor—the objective is not so much eliciting real responses, as convincing an audience of the witness’s credibility. Harris had clearly studied and practiced how to rattle Trump on the stand in front of the jury of voters.
It didn’t matter much, from her perspective, what specifically he said. She wanted him to lose his cool; to forget his goal of defining her, to act like the lying, grievance-driven, backward-looking, self-obsessed bully that people don’t like. Hoo boy did it work. His early attempt at an unfazed demeanor lasted maybe ten minutes. He got testy, and petty.
One of my favorite exchanges of the evening was when she gratuitously insulted his campaign rallies during an answer on immigration—his primary topic! Which led to:
Muir: Let me just ask, though, why did you try to kill that bill and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.
TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies….
NOT the pivot his team wanted there.
And it was in that very same response that Trump declared that immigrants are eating America’s household pets.
As for Muir and Davis, their goals are different—they actually want to get interviewees to discuss for voters issues that they haven’t sufficiently responded to before. One technique is to frame your question in a way that, if it goes unanswered, can be re-asked as an effective follow-up. Both moderators did this quite effectively. Muir, for example, framed the Ukraine topic as a question about whether Trump even wants Ukraine to win against Russia. After Trump blustered about the cost of war and the potential for nuclear escalation and his negotiating skills, Muir followed up with “Do you believe it's in the U.S. best interests for Ukraine to win this war? Yes or no?” Trump still dodged the question—which effectively told the audience that he does not.
But the winner was Davis, who used the technique to even better effect on health care, and Trump’s long-promised alternative; the follow-up re-ask led to a new Trumpism that may live on for the remainder of the campaign: “I have concepts of a plan.”
[And Jonathan:]
Oddly enough, it turns out that having Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard do your debate prep does not actually ready you to talk to anyone outside of the closed conservative information feedback loop.
Although who knows if it would matter anyway. Trump has his riffs, and he’s going to give them regardless of whether they make any sense or not. Or, for that matter, whether they’re connected to reality or not.
Trump has now done seven of these debates, and he’s given seven terrible performances – seven of the eight worst performances in general election presidential debate history, with only the debate that cost Joe Biden his nomination in the same ballpark. (Add the vice-presidential debates and maybe — maybe — Dan Quayle and Admiral Stockdale get into that conversation, but I’d just let them round out the bottom ten). To be fair, by now it’s not just about debate skills. How do you defend the fact that you’ve been indicted and, in one case, convicted? That you backed an insurrection? That a large percentage of the people you hired have turned against you?
Obviously it would help if he didn’t rant about fictional nonsense, but he’s a candidate with a lot of vulnerabilities even if he was any good at this. But he can’t even do a decent convention acceptance speech, which is easy. Of course he’s terrible at this.
And Harris took advantage. She was very good, and got better as she went along.
Two things about her performance. One is that she gave her strongest supporters a lot of “I’ve been waiting for someone to say that” answers, especially on abortion but also on other questions. For everyone else, she had a series of answers about turning the page, about being a president for the whole nation, and about caring about you the voter while Trump cares only about himself. She was impressively disciplined in keeping to those well-prepared answers, ignoring the temptation to correct the various false things Trump was saying.
The other thing: As many have noted, embedded in those answers were a string of provocations to bait Trump into ranting and raving responses. It’s not just that these were successful over the course of the debate. There’s also a media norms aspect to it, because that kind of tactical trap is exactly the sort of thing that the “neutral” media allows itself to praise, which CNN’s Jake Tapper did right after the debate. The media isn’t allowed (by their own norms) to say that, for example, one candidate has a better health care or Ukraine or abortion policy. They’re barely allowed to say that one candidate demonstates mastery of the policy details while the other seems entirely ignorant of them. But they are not only allowed, but happy to talk about successful campaign tactics and strategies. I don’t know whether it was deliberate or not, but baiting Trump gave neutral pundits a path to praising her that normal strong policy answers would not have done.
All that said: I have no predictions about how it will affect the polling short-term and if it does it’s unlikely to last. Still, I think the Harris camp is going to be a lot happier than Team Trump for now.
Thank you for all this and a calming presence this next day.
Why I hoped for really policy is beyond me. Then too I am pretty wonky/nerdy.
In addition to Orban/Putin/Springfield immigrants - tho I hoped trump would’ve answered how he’d remove 11m people AND save the economic impact - the Obamacare term that only he uses & a plan for a plan IF it’s more affordable was my night maker.
This is a SUPERB overview of the debate -- I'm grateful that you've created Good/Bad Politics. David, I thought of yesterday's column as I listened to the moderators and I agree they did a solid job with both planned questions and moments (like the pet eating) in which they quickly pivoted to a neutrally delivered fact check.