By any reasonable measure it was a massacre.
Overall, Kamala Harris performed brilliantly, under enormous pressure. She spoke lucidly, fluidly, convincingly, eloquently. She did not let Donald Trump fluster her. As he spouted his usual stream of insults, lies, and incoherent bluster, she hit back, and hard. “You are a disgrace,” she said to him, repeatedly. She quoted members of his own administration, including his Defense Secretary and National Security Advisor, who called him a danger to American democracy and security. She called him out for the ridiculous claims he was making, including the absurd idea that she is in favor of “executing” new-born babies, and that Haitian migrants in Ohio are killing dogs and cats for food (a viral social media meme of the past few days that has been quickly debunked). She mocked and baited Trump. Go to his rallies, she told the audience, deliberately picking the subject on which he is most sensitive. You will see “people start leaving… out of exhaustion and boredom.” And she clearly did get under his skin. His voice rose, and grew louder, and he jumped erratically from topic to topic. Again and again, he fell back on the immigrants who are “destroying our country,” and to the fact under Harris and Biden “we are a failing nation.” He looked more than ever like the crazy uncle at the holiday table, ranting incoherently. He sounded as if he was running for president of MAGA Twitter, not for president of the United States. Harris and the moderators pushed him on the fact that for nine years now he has been promising to replace Barack Obama’s signature health insurance reform with something better. After nine years, do you have a plan? he was asked. “I have concepts of a plan,” he responded weakly. It was a devastating moment.
It was not a perfect performance for Harris. She started out uncertainly on the economy, with verbal hesitations that made her naturally high and nasal voice sound frail. Beyond calling for a $50,000 tax credit for small businesses, she offered very few specifics on the topic— indeed, throughout the debate she tended to fall back on verbiage about creating an “opportunity economy” without saying what the phrase meant or how she would actually create the thing. She did not do a particularly convincing job of distancing herself from Joe Biden or defending his record.
Yet when a question of abortion came up at the end of the first quarter hour, she found her stride, denouncing the Supreme Court’s overturning of abortion rights, and passionately describing the plight of twelve-year-old incest victims forced to carry a baby to term, and of women coming close to death because their doctors hesitated to carry out certain procedures after a miscarriage for fear of prosecution. And from then on, she was effectively in control. She called out Trump for his fondness for foreign dictators, and his inability to resist them because of his susceptibility to their flattery. In response, incredibly, he cited a statement of approval from… Viktor Orbán. In general, she took a hawkish, internationalist line on foreign policy issues, insisting on the justice of supporting Ukraine against Russia, on defending Israel (including against Iran), on having “the most lethal” military in the world, and on maintaining strong alliances. This pivot will disappoint her more progressive supporters, and probably drive some votes to the far left candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West. But it was necessary to convince more numerous centrist doubters about her ability to function as a strong commander-in-chief. And throughout, she came back to her leitmotif: moving forward rather than going back to a tired past, uniting the country rather than dividing it, working for all Americans rather than just working for one man. It was banal, but then, a great deal of democratic politics is banal by its nature. Delivering platitudes with conviction is a skill that all successful democratic politicians must master, and Kamala Harris has done so with aplomb.
Harris’s performance was all the more impressive because of the pressure she was under: hundreds of millions watching as the moderators asked her about the way she had changed positions on key issues; an utterly shameless bully across the stage; opponents ready to take every small flub and hesitation and make it into a damning viral meme. Just keeping her cool under this pressure was no easy task. Doing so while producing fluid and convincing answers, facts at hand, and delivering well-rehearsed attack lines with panache, was even harder. But she succeeded, and, just as importantly, threw Trump badly off balance. Only at the very end of the debate did he bring out what should have been his strongest argument throughout, asking why the Biden-Harris administration had not already carried out the policies she is now calling for.
It was so convincing that no one could possibly believe Donald Trump won. A few more honest conservative commentators, such as Erick Erickson and Ron Dreher concede that he did very badly. The less honest ones, along with Trump’s family and his many faithful propagandists, have devoted their energies to accusing the ABC News debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, of bias. It’s true that the two corrected Trump more often than they corrected Harris, but then, while Harris bent the truth more than a few times, it was nothing compared to the mendacity that Trump vomited forth in a steady stream.
But will any of this matter? The debate will certainly make little difference to the MAGA faithful, who will simultaneously say Trump won and blame the moderators for making him lose. The debate is not about to cost Trump the electoral votes of Mississippi or Alabama—and probably not of Ohio or Florida, either. Before the debate, the election stood on a knife edge, with Harris barely ahead in most polls. Now, even if she gains a few points, it may still not be enough to win her the electoral college. The precedent of 2016 is depressing in this respect. Nearly every commentator called Hillary Clinton the winner of that year’s presidential debates, and she went on to win a convincing majority of the popular vote. It didn’t matter.
But there are four reasons to think that the debate may in fact matter enough to turn things firmly in Harris’s favor. First, her performance was far better than that of Clinton, who demolished Trump on matters of substance but did far less well in terms of style—of convincing voters that she was someone who could be entrusted with the presidency. Second, Trump’s performance was notably terrible—quite possibly the second worst in the history of US presidential debates (after Biden’s in June). Third, Harris’s performance will fire up a Democratic base already impressed after her virtually flawless assumption of the party’s nomination, and her orchestration of its August convention. No one in the party can now possibly doubt that it was a good idea to replace Biden on the ticket. Fourth, and probably most important, Harris managed the very difficult feat of keeping her focus, even in the midst of a chaotic and difficult debate, squarely on the issues that will matter most to those small segments of undecided voters in the swing states who may actually decide the winner: economic opportunity, a strong defense, abortion rights.
And if all this wasn’t enough, immediately after the debate, 284 million Instagram users received a long post enthusiastically endorsing Kamala Harris, signed by a self-proclaimed “childless cat lady”: Taylor Swift.