The Tribune

with CHARLIE HARPER

Did you watch the much-anticipated TV debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on Tuesday evening? Who do you think won? And does the debate change in any way how you feel about this year’s American presidential race?

These questions are sure to be among the first to be asked by the thousands of pollsters who are this morning fanning out all across the US in an effort to gauge the effect of a debate between two people who have never actually met but seem to have developed quite an animosity toward each other already.

In some ways, the opening moment at Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia was the most telling, and it set the tone for the 90 minutes that followed.

Both candidates entered the stage. Trump stayed on his side of the stage. Harris, hand extended, walked all the way across the stage to greet him and introduce herself for the first time. For a moment, Trump seemed taken aback, almost as if he was considering not shaking her hand. Then he did so, apparently heartily.

But this is how the debate unfolded, with Harris on the offensive, making the points she and her team felt she needed to make to score with the so-called “undecided” voters in the half-dozen US states where all the sage pundits think this election will be decided.

Another key point, noted immediately afterward by most commentators including the post-game crew on ABC, was the fact that Trump did not once look at Harris. It was as though some neck malady limited his ability to turn his head leftward toward her. He also never really addressed her using her name. He referred to her as “she” or “her.”

One watch party guest, who is a well-credentialed psychologist, noted that Trump with this behavior essentially de-personalised Harris, denying her individuality and indeed her identity. Trump also never smiled during the entire debate, while Harris did so repeatedly.

Overall, Trump failed this test, just as most pundits thought he likely would do. He subsided back into the usual morass of lies, sweeping nonsensical generalities, personal invective and narcissistic bravado. Just like he generally does in his many public appearances.

Harris skewered him on abortion, looked him in the eye and told him he “had been fired by 81 million people” in 2020, reminded the audience of Dick and Liz Cheney’s endorsement of her, and generally called him out to his face.

So she basically won a debate where almost anything less would have been a resounding setback, since Harris held all the cards in this setting. There was no audience for Trump to play to, and two moderators for ABC did a reasonably good job of holding Trump accountable for lies and various misstatements.

At one point, Harris looked directly at Trump and urged him to “stop with the continuing lying”.

Harris also ducked questions about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, inflation, and immigration. She generally avoided answering the moderators’ queries after a brief opening sentence. Often, Harris resorted to “let’s look at how we got here”.

In the run-up to Tuesday’s debate, Trump had a lot to say, as usual. But there was also some clear-eyed insight.

Talking last week with Sean Hannity on a Fox News “town hall interview”, Trump repeated his outlook on the debate by again quoting the boxing champion Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

“You can go in with all the strategy you want, but you have to sort of feel it out as the debate’s taking place,” Trump said. That made sense. But Trump failed to execute.

To most observers, Trump appeared to be also preparing for a possible bad night by engaging in the time-honored practice of lowering expectations.

He has repeatedly attacked the debate sponsors by claiming that ABC News has been unfair to him; his criticism may also be an effort to intimidate the questioners.

Discussing his debate plans, Trump told Hannity and the town hall audience that “it depends a lot on ABC. Will they be fair or not? If they’re not going to be fair, I’m going to be a little bit different than if they are”.

Harris, whose experience as a long-time prosecutor and California attorney general appears to have prepared her exceedingly well for this or any other debate, had also gained much positive notoriety among liberals for her incisive, determined questioning as a senator on the US Senate Judiciary Committee of both Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr and Supreme Court nominee Brett Cavanagh.

Ahead of Tuesday’s showdown, virtually every pundit had at least implicitly expressed the feeling that Harris should win, and win decisively.

In her relatively few public comments in a radio interview last week, Harris said “there’s no floor for him (Trump) in terms of how low he will go. And we should be prepared for that. We should be prepared for the fact that he is not burdened by telling the truth”.

“Ultimately, you know, what I intend to point out is… he tends to fight for himself, not for the American people. And I think that’s going to come out during the debate,” she said. “But I expect that he is — I think he’s going to lie. And he has a playbook that he has used in the past.”

Before the debate, a kind of consensus was emerging that Harris had overcome the lead Trump had built when his opponent was the more visibly aging Biden. While GOP-affiliated pollsters continue to broadly report an even race or a slight Trump advantage, many other polls gave Harris the edge.

One of the best-known of these pollsters spoke candidly but anonymously to some reporters recently. Here are some of her conclusions as of this past weekend:

“I would say that Harris is ahead probably three, three and a half points nationally. There are some places where she’s pulling away, like Wisconsin, and there are some places that are really competitive, like North Carolina, and some places that remain sort of tight and hard to predict. But there’s certainly a clear path in my view to winning the presidential race.

“A key to Harris’s surge is the consolidation of the support of Democratic voters. In battleground states, Biden was getting somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of Democratic voters, and Harris is now getting 90 to 95 percent of Democratic voters. Furthermore, less-frequent and low-motivation voters are trending blue. Many of these less-frequent voters are young people, and they’re clearly more interested in Harris than they were in Biden.”

Poll-taking firms have been speaking out more than before recent elections. This may be because they have whiffed on identifying several important voter trends. But some of their conclusions are potentially quite significant.

For instance, maybe 20 years ago many Hispanic voters were probably Spanish-speakers and rather unpredictable. Now, they are more assimilated and are English-speaking. They will tend to become politically more like everybody else around them. This seems to hold true in South Florida.

And younger black voters obviously had no direct experience with the civil rights movement of the 1960s era. Polling has revealed that many of them don’t go to church, which is a major organiser and incubator of political activity and participation.

One respected pollster said: “Harris may need to expand her lead by another point or two, in order to win the electoral college. That involves getting more independent women, more non-college women. It’s all women. I don’t do a poll where men move up or down very much at all in their views of the candidates. It’s all about the movement among women voters.”

Finally, there is a rough consensus among poll-takers that Trump is basically getting what he got in terms of voter support in 2020. He got 47 percent four years ago and he’s getting 47 percent overall now. Nor has his overall favorability rating changed.

It’s anyone’s guess at this point how much Tuesday’s debate will influence the November election in the US. History says very few debates have had much lasting effect. In fact, several historians think the most influential debate was the first one televised, between well-known incumbent vice president Richard Nixon and Massachusetts upstart Senator John F Kennedy. That was over 60 years ago.