Kamala Harris got the debate she wanted

16 quick thoughts on tonight's debate

Sep 11, 2024

Tonight was the first and perhaps only debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Thanks to all of you who joined us in the subscriber chat. It’s been a busy couple of weeks with travel and a lot of long newsletter pieces, so I’m going to prioritize speed rather than depth here with a series of bullet points based on notes I took while the debate was underway.

There is a strong consensus that Harris won the night. Polymarket predicts there’s a 97 percent chance that Harris is judged the winner of debate in snap polls, and also has the overall race drawing to 50/50 after having shown a Trump lead at the start of the night. Bitcoin prices are down, which also implies a loss for Trump. Even the Fox News panel that I caught at the tail end of the evening seemed to concede that it was a win for Harris. UPDATE: Polymarket was right: Harris won the CNN snap poll of debate-watchers 63-37. You can find polling on past debates here. On average, the winner of the debate has led in this poll by 18 points, so Harris’s 26-point win is toward the higher end of the range.
Harris is a good tactician, and I imagine her campaign couldn’t have been more pleased with Trump repeatedly taking the bait literally every time that she offered it.
Trump didn’t seem to know to do with the long 2-minute blocks and microphones muted. He’d have coherent and occasionally even fairly effective sections for 30 seconds at a time, but then he’d veer off into another direction. You’ll probably see some process stories complaining that Trump wasn’t well prepared for the evening.
And Trump also was very much in “campaign rally” mode, speaking in terminology that was more coded toward the GOP base and name-dropping people like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram.
Lots of GOP complaining on Twitter about the biased moderation, which whether you agree or not, is almost always a bearish indicator.
But to be fair, the set of questions was pretty friendly to Harris. Nothing about Biden’s fitness for office, for instance, even though his catastrophic failure in the first debate is the reason she rather than Biden was standing on stage tonight. And ABC News also doing basically real-time fact checking played well for Harris. Maybe some of the constant Democratic ref-working of the mainstream media played dividends.
Trump was more effective on the economy than on other topics, sticking to simpler rhetoric that an economist might not approve of (e.g. on tariffs) but which will probably play reasonably well with the median undecided voter. I thought the first 10 minutes or so, focused on the economy, were actually pretty good for Trump — but there may be a fatigue issue, as there was with Biden. We didn’t see much “A-game” after that.
Sustained debate early in the evening on abortion very bullish for Harris, both in terms of the substance and the subject matter — it’s probably Democrats’ best single topic. In particular, Trump couldn’t really land the point about the Supreme Court throwing it to the states as being a good thing. What happens in the first 15-30 minutes almost always matters disproportionately relative to the rest of the evening.
Style-wise, Harris seemed quite canned at times, like in invoking Camp David.
And the stature gap in terms of physical size was also notable, especially with Harris having a shorter podium. Sometimes you’ll hear people say that you should watch the debate with the sound off, and by that measure it was much closer than with the sound on.
The most meme-able moment of the evening — Trump saying he had “concepts of a plan” on Obamacare but not articulating any details — also clearly favorable for Harris.
Harris was repeatedly trying to recycle themes from convention speech, like American competitiveness against China and the military having a “lethal” fighting force. I thought Harris’s convention speech was very good, but this was interesting in light of her not getting a sustained convention bounce.
Trump seemed more like the incumbent, which is bullish for Harris. He had some effective moments in attributing blame to Harris for the Biden-Trump administration — like in his closing statement where he asked what she’d been doing for the past three-and-a-half years — but he wasn’t focused enough to build these to a crescendo.
I wrote yesterday that I thought there wouldn’t be a second debate, but if Harris gains in the polls, this might actually wind up being in the zone where both candidates have an incentive to debate again, with the race coverging fairly close to 50/50.
But there’s also some chance that the Twitter/pundit buzz is getting a little carried away and underrating the impact of things like Harris’s gender. It would be surprising if this had an impact on the scale of the Biden-Trump debate, for instance.
In closing, Harris got the debate she wanted. If she isn’t able to move the needle in the polls at least a little bit, maybe that means the country just isn’t buying what she’s selling.