After Vice President Kamala Harris’s first debate with former President Donald Trump Tuesday, Democrats across the country breathed a sigh of relief and thought: That’s more like it.
Harris, by widespread consensus, was the clear winner. “Make no mistake about it, Trump had a bad night,” Fox News’s Brit Hume said on the network afterward. “My sense is she came out of this in pretty good shape.”
The online prediction market Polymarket — reflecting bettors’ estimates of what’s likely to happen — showed a 97 percent chance that the debate would help Harris in the polls. Prediction markets typically just reflect the conventional wisdom, but what this does tell us is that very few people are willing to bet actual money that the debate will help Trump.
The conventional wisdom matters, because the winner of the debate isn’t just determined by what happened onstage, but also by the spin war that ensues afterward. The narrative of who won, the kind of groupthink of the commentariat, gets endlessly discussed in the days after the debate — and, in this case, that narrative is: Harris won by effectively baiting Trump.
It’s too early to say how much the debate will impact the race. Though politics junkies are near-unanimous that Trump lost, it is at least possible that swing voters will have different takeaways. Early signs, though, suggest they may have the same takeaway: a Washington Post focus group of 24 undecided swing state voters found that 22 thought Harris performed better. And a CNN post-debate poll found that 63 percent of debate watchers thought Harris won.
It is also possible the debate will have little effect on the polls — or, that if it does help Harris, it will help her only briefly, since other events will impact the polls in the nearly two months remaining before Election Day.
But, running the briefest presidential campaign in modern history, the stakes were high for Harris — voters have seen little of her so far, particularly in unscripted high-pressure settings like a debate. And she delivered the strong performance she needed.
Before the debate, the conventional wisdom was that, to have a strong night, Trump needed to do a few things. He needed to remain focused on tying Harris to the Biden administration’s unpopular record on the economy, immigration, and foreign policy. He had to avoid minefields for him on his weakest issues, abortion and democracy. And he needed to avoid getting sidetracked on rants or conspiracy theories.
But he mostly failed to do those things.
On abortion, Trump took credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, saying it happened “through the genius and heart and strength” of the conservative justices.
He also repeatedly dodged the question of whether he’d veto a national abortion ban if Congress sent one to his desk — saying (probably accurately) that Congress wouldn’t pass such a ban. And yet, despite several opportunities, he couldn’t bring himself to clearly say he’d veto such a bill — perhaps fearing angering his pro-life allies, who have been disgruntled with his handling of the issue of late.
Asked whether he regretted anything he did on January 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the US Capitol, he didn’t come up with anything. The only thing he complained about was that, in the midst of the chaos inside the building, one of his supporters, Ashli Babbitt, “was shot by an out of control police officer,” he said. (Babbitt and other angry rioters were trying to breach the last barrier separating them from members of Congress who feared for their lives.)
And he repeatedly voiced ludicrous-sounding conspiracy theories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, or states executing babies after they are born.
Late in the debate, Trump claimed that Harris “is Biden,” but he wasn’t even consistent on that — earlier in the evening, Trump had insisted that President Joe Biden “hates” Harris and “can’t stand her,” an odd choice if your campaign strategy is to make Harris responsible for Biden’s record.
And while it is true that Trump hit Harris on inflation and the border many times, it seems unlikely that any of that messaging will sink in when he was saying so many other bizarre and nonsensical things that will get far more attention.
Perhaps the clearest indication Trump lost, though, is that his supporters took to social media to complain vociferously about the moderators — the telling move of whining about the refs, when the outcome isn’t what they’d hoped.
In the days before the debate, it had seemed that the good vibes Kamala Harris had enjoyed since her sudden ascent as the Democratic presidential nominee were in danger of disappearing.
Polls showed a very close toss-up race. Nate Silver’s election forecast model tipped toward making Trump the favorite. Criticism rose of Harris for mostly avoiding media interviews in unscripted settings. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Sunday even showed Trump taking the lead by 1 percentage point nationally — an excellent result for Trump, given the Electoral College’s slant against Democrats.
But in retrospect, Harris’s avoidance of the media helped her debate performance have more impact. She preferred a high-stakes setting where she’d be contrasted with Trump over one in which she’d be squaring off against journalists.
And she was very effective at drawing that contrast.
Harris hammered home her core message that Trump only cares about himself, not ordinary Americans. She repeated, several times, that her campaign plan includes tax cuts for young families and tax deductions for startup small businesses. She voiced righteous outrage about how Trump’s Supreme Court appointees eliminated national abortion rights protections. She promised to unite Americans rather than divide them, and said she’d represent a new generation of leadership.
Repeatedly, she baited Trump into wasting time indulging in his narcissism — asked about immigration, she threw in a claim that people often leave Trump’s rallies early. Trump couldn’t resist using some of his time to clarify that his rallies are great and everyone loves him.
There were some questionable moments for Harris. It was clear she did not want to talk about inflation — not wanting to get drawn into a discussion about Biden’s record, in contrast to her own tax plan. Asked why she no longer supported some very progressive positions she took while running for president in 2020, she really didn’t give a clear answer on why.
But it’s not clear she had any real perfect answer on those topics — avoiding them may have been her best strategic option.
And where she had points to make and punches to land on Tuesday night, she did.
Winner: ABC News’s debate moderators
David Muir and Linsey Davis had a difficult task going into Tuesday night’s debate, but they mostly acquitted themselves well. The pair of ABC News moderators ran a tight debate, keeping the candidates to their allotted times (for the most part) and finding the right moments to step in to fact-check as needed.
A particularly striking moment came when Trump repeated multiple times the false claim that Democrats support killing babies even after birth. Trump went on to ramble about how he is fine with abortion policy being decided by the states, and waffled about his support for a national abortion ban. As soon as he finished, Davis clarified to the audiences at home: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
Similarly, when Trump expounded on the racist far-right conspiracy theories that undocumented immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are killing and eating pets, Muir once again fact-checked the claim, saying ABC News “did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”
No similar fact-checks of Harris were made, which contributed to a feeling among Trump allies that the moderators were conducting a “rig job.” “Trump needs to directly challenge the moderators. Say they’re in the tank for Kamala. Put them on the defensive,” the far-right activist Chris Rufo said on X.
And yet, despite the rules allowing the moderators to mute mics to prevent crosstalk, Trump was repeatedly allowed to talk over Harris, to get the final word during exchanges, and generally to speak for longer than Harris — a fact that rankled liberal viewers.
Ultimately, the moderators did a good job of keeping the debate on track, at least to the degree you can when moderating a debate involving Trump. The fact-checking may have been controversial with Trump supporters, but they did what journalists should do: call out falsehoods, and insist on accuracy. They walked a fine line and managed to mostly stay on it.
The national debate over immigration has shifted greatly, and that was on full display Tuesday night.
In 2020, Democrats emphasized Trump’s cruelty toward asylum seekers and other migrants at the border, while Trump made exaggerated — or outright false — claims about the alleged dangers immigrants posed to citizens’ safety and sovereignty.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump has stayed the course, only growing more extreme in his rhetoric. But Democrats have pivoted greatly. On Tuesday, Harris eschewed any significant mention of immigrants’ plight — or their massive contributions to the country. Instead, she accused Trump of being insufficiently attentive to border security.
Specifically, Harris criticized Trump for urging Republicans in Congress not to vote for a right-wing border bill that Democrats tried to pass in February. The bill was a bipartisan compromise that would have instituted a Republican priority — a new authority to quickly expel migrants arriving on the southern border at times of high demand — in exchange for something Democrats wanted: closing gaps in the legal immigration system that have left everyone from the children of high-skilled foreign workers to Afghan refugees in limbo.
“He preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” Harris said.
“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it,” Trump said. “This is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
At no point in the exchange, however, did the Democrat come to the defense of immigrants — a marked departure from the political dynamic that has ruled this issue for years. And that is perhaps a reflection of the fact that anti-immigrant sentiment in the electorate is higher than at any point since the early 2000s, just after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Border crossings have come down significantly in recent months due to a crackdown by Mexican authorities and Biden’s implementation of new asylum restrictions. Voters have correspondingly become more favorable toward Harris on immigration. But Harris nevertheless did not seem compelled in the debate to take a more empathetic stance on immigration.
Winner: Swifties for Kamala
Seemingly the only way a presidential debate could possibly be overshadowed would be to have the biggest star in the world break some news immediately after it — which is what happened when Taylor Swift officially endorsed Harris via an Instagram post released about half an hour after the end of the debate.
“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Swift wrote. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election … I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make.”
The endorsement comes after some uncertainty over whether Swift would even comment on the election, despite vocally supporting Democrats in past elections. To the extent politics touched Swift, it centered over her recent friendship with Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes’s wife Brittany, who appears to be supportive of Trump.
But tonight, “Swifties for Kamala” got their wish.
Swift’s endorsement offered the slyest of subtweets of Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance. She highlighted how she admired Harris’s running mate Gov. Tim Walz, and his “standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.” The piece de resistance: She signed off the endorsement as a “childless cat lady” — the most influential one alive.