Did Harris Really Get the Debate She Needed?

Let’s start out by stating that the emerging conventional wisdom surrounding Tuesday’s presidential debate is probably correct. The night started out promisingly enough for former President Donald Trump. He handled initial questions about the economy reasonably well; the opening theme, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago,” is exactly the theme he wants heading toward November. Trump seemed surprisingly confident and calm. Vice President Kamala Harris seemed nervous and a bit off of her game. For the first five minutes or so, it didn’t seem like a repeat of the June debate, but it did seem like one where Trump might be fighting to a draw.

Harris then proceeded to grab Trump by the combover and drag him around the debate stage for 85 minutes.

Sure, there were moments where Trump acquitted himself reasonably well. He seems to have held his ground on the abortion question, and his jabs on why the Biden-Harris administration didn’t make good on what she is promising for a Harris-Walz administration found their mark.

Overall, though, from a debater’s standpoint, it wasn't close. Trump was defensive, erratic, and made claims that either confused facts or were simply at odds with them. Harris, on the other hand, was confident and prosecuted the case against Trump with precision.

But did Harris really accomplish what she needed? This is where the conventional wisdom may be veering off course. There’s a difference between what a candidate or a group wants and what it needs. What Harris and her supporters seemingly wanted was a technically adept evisceration of Trump. This echoes the desires of the highly educated moderate-to-liberal class of voters – which includes a lot of journalists – that most desperately wants Trump to be defeated.  Harris delivered for them in spades. It’s no surprise that this class is ecstatic.

But what did she need? The pre-debate polls were close and had moved against her in recent days. Frankly, to have received the adulatory media she received over the six weeks after Biden dropped out and yet only be up a point or two in national polling isn’t a great sign. In short, she needed to either convince undecided voters to break her way or to win over some soft Trump supporters.

Did anything transpire on the debate stage that might have assisted this? We might start by asking ourselves: What did anyone, undecided or otherwise, learn about Trump last night? That he’s erratic? That he is bombastic and doesn’t always know what he’s talking about? That he can be a real jerk?

The anti-Trump group described above seems to think that Trump’s supporters adore the former president and that if he were only exposed, the scales would fall from their eyes, and they would see him the same way that many college-educated professionals see him. 

Yet interview after interview shows that almost everyone is keenly aware of Trump’s shortcomings. If I had a nickel for every time that someone said, “I don’t like Trump at all, but I like [insert policy here],” well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d have a lot of nickels. Putting it differently: If undecided voters considered Trump to be a very stable genius, they’d probably be Trump supporters today. On the other hand, if convincing them that Trump had real drawbacks were enough to win them over, they would already be Harris voters.

In short: Effectively pantsing Trump may have been cathartic, but it probably didn’t move the ball. The man has been running around on the national stage in his skivvies for nine years now.

What about Harris? This is where I believe the debate may have been a missed opportunity for her. The great advantage she had in this race, which I’ve been writing about for months, is that her late entry provided a shot of adrenaline that enabled her to keep going to the start of early voting. What I missed, though, is the disadvantage: When a presidential candidate makes her way through the primary process and the dead period between the end of the primaries and Labor Day, she is effectively introducing herself to the American people. She’s fleshing out electoral positions, perfecting her stump speech, and creating an image of herself that provides a foundation for the fall campaign.

Harris got none of that. The result is that even people who have followed the campaign closely know only a few things about her from a policy perspective: She’s pro-choice, she’s a former prosecutor, she once held a raft of policy positions that were pretty far to the left but that she may-or-may-not still hold, and she isn’t Donald Trump.

Her debate strategy leaned heavily into the former aspect, but as described above, “not Donald Trump” as a strategy has its limits. Vibes can only get you so far. She probably needed to use the debate to better introduce herself to the American people, to flesh out her policy stances, and to reassure people that the changes of heart she has had on issues are sincere.

Maybe she accomplished that, and undecided voters emerged with a better sense of what a Harris administration would look like. Perhaps the takeaway is that she is reassuring. If so, the polls that come out over the next few weeks will tell the tale.  From my perspective, though, the debate wound up being mostly about Trump, and Trump’s a known quantity. Telling us more about Donald Trump that we already know probably won’t change the trajectory of the race.