The U.S. presidential debate between Vice President Harris and former President Trump was certainly highly anticipated. Following the poor debate performance of President Biden at the June 27th debate and his subsequent decision to drop out three weeks later, Vice President Harris became the presumptive, and eventual nominee for the Democratic Party. President Trump, who had previously developed a large amount of momentum leading up to the debate, following the debate, and the assassination attempt against Trump on July 14th, began to see his momentum dwindle. Vice President Harris appeared to be gaining ground and frequently surpassing President Trump in national and swing state polling. However, the momentum began to see another shift towards Trump in the past week or two, as polling suggested the race was tightening and even tilting back in Trump’s favor.
During the campaign of Vice President Harris, one major criticism against her was that Harris had rarely ever spoken without the use of a teleprompter. Indeed, Harris has often used a teleprompter during many of her speeches since becoming the Democratic nominee, and there were numerous questions regarding how well Harris will do in the debate. I, like many others, expected Vice President Harris to perform much better than Biden did in the June debate, but would she be able to outperform Trump? If she cannot do so, will she continue to lose the momentum that was gradually dissipating leading up to the debate?
Based on everything I observed in the debate, Harris exceeded expectations while Trump underperformed compared to expectations, but this doesn’t mean either candidate performed particularly well. Kamala Harris did particularly well at baiting Trump by going after mostly irrelevant or non-important points. For example, Harris mentioned Trump’s crowd size and how many people would begin leaving Trump rallies early out of boredom. The correct response from Trump would have been to ignore the attempted bait or brush it off with a quick sentence. However, Trump chose to take the bait and went into a long rant regarding his crowd sizes compared to Harris’s crowd sizes, which made Trump seem unfocused. Harris was undoubtedly much more coherent than President Biden was back in June, and this alone was likely refreshing to many viewers.
However, as someone who is usually more interested in whether or not a candidate directly answers a question, I found that Harris either dodged the question entirely or gave only “half-baked” answers. While President Harris did directly answer some questions, such as extending a $6,000 tax cut for young families, or essentially a child tax credit, and a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up businesses. However, other answers were seemingly vague and largely lacking substance, such as her answer to the question as to whether or not Americans were better off four years ago, where Harris responded by discussing how she had a middle-class upbringing and never directly answering the question. This happened multiple times throughout the debate, where Harris would either deflect the question like the above or give vague or cliche talking points with little to no depth or substance.
On the other hand, Trump made several critical mistakes that led him to underperform in this debate compared to expectations. Some positive aspects of Trump’s debate performance deserve to be mentioned. I was personally surprised by his energy levels, which I found to be higher than expected. Video and reports from recent Trump rallies suggested that Trump may be showing increasing signs of age, as he often appeared to lack the energy and overall swagger that we had seen from Trump in previous years. However, one may wonder if this high energy could have influenced why Trump appeared to get easily sidetracked by irrelevant points.
At multiple points during the debate, it seemed as if Harris was successfully able to derail Trump’s focus, leading to long tangents by Trump regarding unrelated topics. This includes the several times in which Trump brought up immigration, including the situation in Springfield, Ohio, where he began talking about unsubstantiated claims of Haitian immigrants eating the pets of local residents. Trump became particularly frustrated over Harris’s attack on Trump’s rallies and the claim that people are leaving Trump rallies out of boredom.
As far as actual substance goes, Trump, like Vice President Harris, struggled to directly answer a number of questions, and even some of his directly-answered questions left much to be desired. For example, when President Trump was pressed on his healthcare plan, Trump stated that he “has concepts of a plan,” a statement that received considerable backlash post-debate. While it is undoubtedly true that the moderators of the debate, David Muir and Linsey Davis, were questionable at best, as their fact-checking did seem to be somewhat biased in favor of Vice President Harris, President Trump did himself no favors by dodging some questions, taking the bait, and being seeming unfocused for large sections of the debate.
Although I believe Vice President Harris won this debate, I do not believe that the debate will significantly impact the election. Although we may see some level of enthusiasm increase for Harris, I don’t anticipate that this will be entirely sustained going into election day. However, it should be noted that other factors may improve turnout for Vice President Harris, as data suggests that Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris is correlated with boosted voter registration in certain areas. I would also wonder if Trump’s decision not to participate in another debate could be a strategic misstep on his end. While refusing to participate in a debate, historically, has been seen as a poor decision on the part of the candidate, this has seemingly faded a bit in recent years, as Katie Hobbs managed to win the Arizona gubernatorial election against Kari Lake in 2022, despite choosing not to debate Lake. However, Hobbs’ win over Lake could be attributed to Lake being a relatively unpopular and polarizing candidate. Still, despite all these factors, I don’t expect the trajectory of this race to be altered substantially by the debate, and this election, in my eyes, remains a toss-up, as it had been prior to the debate.
