The stakes couldn’t have been higher when Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump met Tuesday night for their only scheduled debate of the 2024 contest.
In the previous clash, President Biden — then the presumptive Democratic nominee — delivered such a wobbly performance that his own party soon forced him to withdraw. Now, after an initial burst of momentum for Harris, the polls show the race is (once again) too close to call.
With less than two months to go until Election Day — and no other debates on the calendar — Tuesday could have been the last best chance for Harris and Trump to shake things up before voters start casting their ballots. So who had a better night? Here are four takeaways from the face-off in Philadelphia.
Harris triggers Trump
The vice president spent most of her career as a prosecutor before heading to Washington. It showed Tuesday night.
To be sure, Harris used her time on stage to “prosecute the case” against Trump, as expected, criticizing his positions on taxes, abortion, the border, Jan. 6, Ukraine, Obamacare and so on. But more important than what Harris told viewers about Trump — all of which they’ve heard before, and largely learned to tune out — was what she managed to show them: How easily he can be baited into losing control.
Skillful prosecutors know how to provoke self-incriminating behavior — and that was very much Harris’s strategy during the debate. Again and again, she set traps for Trump; again and again, he walked right into them.
Harris “invited” viewers to attend Trump’s rallies, for instance, where he “talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter” and “people start leaving … early out of exhaustion and boredom.” Moments later, after defensively claiming that “we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” Trump suddenly started ranting about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, “eating the pets of the people that live there” — a claim that has no basis in reality. (Trump doubled down after the debate by sharing memes on social media about the unverified reports.)
Harris’s goal was to puncture Trump’s sense of pride. She attacked his business acumen (“he got $400 million on a silver platter” from his father, she said, “then filed for bankruptcy six times”); his military leadership (“world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump”); and his political success (“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people … clearly he’s having a very difficult time processing that”) — and then stood aside as her opponent demonstrated, on live TV, that he can’t keep his cool in confrontational, high-pressure situations.
“These dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again, because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors,” Harris said at one point. “That is why we understand that we have to have a president who is not consistently weak and wrong on national security.”
No, “she’s the one … that’s weak,” Trump sputtered in response. But that’s not how Harris made it seem on stage.
Trump avoids ‘her’ while Harris addresses ‘you’
Presidential debates aren’t collegiate point-scoring affairs; they’re usually won or lost on vibes and moments rather than wonkery. And what was striking about Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Harris, aside from the words they said, was how differently they acted toward each other — and to the audience.
The tone was set in the opening seconds. Trump ambled slowly in from the wings, heading for his podium; Harris went directly to Trump and initiated a handshake that he seemed to want to avoid. “Let’s have a good debate,” Harris said.
That pattern — Trump avoidant, Harris direct — repeated itself throughout the evening. Trump only referred to his rival as the “vice president” once: to call her the “worst vice president in the history of our country.” Otherwise, he seemed only able to address Harris in the third person, as “she” or “her” — as if she wasn’t there. He rarely made eye contact.
In contrast, Harris called Trump the “former president” more than a dozen times — and when she wasn’t referring to Trump by his title, she was looking right at him and addressing him as “you.”
Harris did the same thing to the camera, and by extension, the people watching at home. “You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your needs and your desires,” she said. “And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first. And I pledge to you that I will.”
Harris and Trump’s respective behavior and body language reinforced that message — that only one candidate on stage was comfortable confronting the other, and that only one was interested in connecting with undecided voters.
One issue to rule them all … at least for Trump
Forced to play defense for much of the debate, Trump instinctively retreated to his comfort zone: immigration. No matter what the question was about, the former president found a way to accuse Harris — whom he inaccurately called Biden’s “border czar” — of “destroying the country” by allowing “millions of criminals” to pour into the country via Mexico.
Never mind that the best available data suggests the crime rate has fallen significantly over the past few years, down near the lowest levels ever recorded, and that numerous studies have found that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens. Trump has been running on the border for years, and he’s not about to stop now.
But what about when the debate turned to other issues — like, say, abortion?
There, Trump claimed that overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to ban the procedure was “what everybody wanted — Democrats, Republicans and everybody else” (despite polls showing otherwise).
Harris was ready to pounce.
“I have talked with women around our country,” she said. “This is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot — she didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that. And I pledge to you, when Congress passes a bill to put back in place the protections of Roe v. Wade — as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.”
In the run-up to the debate, much was made about the need for Harris to provide voters with more specifics. But while Trump accused Harris Tuesday of simply copying Biden’s agenda — “She IS Biden,” he snapped — he actually ceded the “policy” card to her by returning to the border so many times and saying so little of substance elsewhere.
“Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump,” Harris said. “What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country — one who believes in what is possible, one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do instead of always disparaging the American people.”
Harris then mentioned her “plan to give startup businesses $50,000 tax deduction to pursue their ambitions, their innovation, their ideas, their hard work”; her plan to create a “$6,000 [tax credit] for young families, for the first year of your child’s life;” her plan to offer “$25,000 [in] down payment assistance for first time home buyers.”
“That’s the kind of conversation I believe… people really want tonight, as opposed to a conversation that is constantly about belittling and name-calling,” Harris concluded.
Trump has some plans too (or “concepts of a plan,” as he put it when asked what he would replace Obamacare with). But the former president was too busy calling America “a failing nation” beset by foreign criminals to talk much about them.
‘The most consequential moment of this campaign?’
That’s how ABC News billed the debate during its preshow. But it remains to be seen whether Tuesday’s spectacle will move the needle.
Because Trump is such a familiar figure — and because views of him are so fixed — there’s little left for him to say or do to change how voters see him, one way or the other. Getting repeatedly fact-checked by ABC’s moderators won’t upend his campaign. So the former president is likely to hold onto the 45% or so of voters who tell pollsters they support him — the same 45% who voted for him in 2016 and 2020.
Yet 45% isn’t enough to win an election. What Trump really needed to do Tuesday night was change how voters see Harris — or let Harris do the job herself. Instead, Trump allowed his opponent to project precisely the kind of presidential, forward-looking positivity she wanted to project — without provoking any of the meandering, word-salad responses that have caused her problems in the past.
That probably means Harris won the debate. But two months can be an eternity in politics — and winning a debate isn’t the same thing as winning in November.