By Dr Adam Quinn, Department of Political Science and International Studies, School of Government, University of Birmingham
The question going into Tuesday’s debate was which candidate could more successfully exploit the format to expose their opponent’s biggest weaknesses in front of the largest audience of the campaign. By that standard, Donald Trump performed extremely poorly and emerged the clear loser. Kamala Harris, though she had the occasional wobbly moment, emerged not merely unscathed but strengthened.
The game-plan for the Trump campaign was to tie Harris to the Biden administration’s unpopular record on the economy, cost of living, and immigration, and portray her simultaneously as a California liberal with a left-wing agenda and also a phoney for trying now to evade her own record of past progressive positions. The hope was that if Trump could maintain message discipline, and hammer her along these lines, she would buckle under the spotlight.
The Harris team’s plan was to bait Trump into self-sabotage. If he could be provoked with attacks designed to poke his ego, he might lose his temper, and with it his focus and self-discipline. Thus knocked off his game, he would spend less time delivering his own message on his key issues, and more time rambling intemperately in ways that would make him look a blend of scary and foolish in the eyes of undecided voters. Meanwhile, Harris could score points by hitting hard on her own stronger issues, especially on the Republican Party’s efforts to restrict abortion and reproductive rights.
Within the first ten minutes of the debate, it became apparent that Harris’s plan was prevailing. Early on, she dangled bait in front of Trump, in the form of a jab about his rally crowds. He lunged right for it, launching into a sprawling, belligerent and at times bizarre answer (at one point he bellowed that immigrants were stealing and eating Americans’ pets) that made him seem angry and incoherent. Harris could step back and let him damage himself, before returning to speak – when he had finally finished –with remarks designed to make her seem the more self-possessed presidential figure. Once that dynamic set in, it never really departed. Harris, whose opening statement and first question response had shown some signs of nerves, settled. Her composure and stature grew as it became apparent her plan was working, and she repeated the manoeuvre several times. Trump, meanwhile, began to look ever-angrier, and was tempted again and again into answers on a range of issues – January 6th, Ukraine, healthcare, immigration – that did him no favours.
A popular line of attack on Harris going into the debate was that her campaign was short on policy specifics. Clearly conscious of that, she alluded several times to having “plans” in contrast to her opponent, and highlighted a couple of kitchen table economic pledges, on small business tax deductions and child tax credits, pegged to her theme of creating an “opportunity economy”. Still, a more capable debating opponent should have been able to make her sweat by pressing on how substantive and credible her wider plans really were, across a range of issues, and where exactly she was differentiating herself from the Biden administration. They would also have held her feet to the fire more effectively in demanding to know why she had changed position on so many issues since her 2019 primary campaign. Trump, distracted by his own preoccupations and easily led into peevish outbursts, was not capable of that kind of forensic interrogation. In his closing statement, he raised briefly a question that one suspects his advisers had told him should be his theme through the whole debate: if Harris had such great plans, why wasn’t the administration in which she was Vice President implementing them already? As soon as that talking point had appeared, however, it was gone again, as he veered back into less effective territory. Harris, meanwhile, having painted Trump during the debate as wilfully divisive and temperamentally unfit, closed with a polished appeal to American unity, and a pledge to be focused on the future and the public good, rather than the past and personal grievances. She also took the chance to remind people about her background as a prosecutor, a useful piece of inoculation against accusations of being a soft-on-crime liberal.
It was telling that in the aftermath of the debate, the Harris campaign was willing to offer another if Trump wanted it, while Trump – with more than a whiff of desperation – appeared personally in the post-debate media room, to try and spin away the gathering consensus he had tanked.
There are weeks to go in the campaign, and debates are just one part of a complex, moving picture. In 2016, Hillary Clinton unquestionably won all three of her debates with Trump and still lost the election in November. But the mission of the night for Harris was to present herself to unfamiliar or undecided voters as an assured, capable figure ready to lead the nation, while inducing Trump to show his worst side to that same audience. In the first regard, she did well enough. In the latter, the mission could not have been more thoroughly accomplished.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Birmingham.