Member Newsletter
Tonight we have the second presidential debate of the 2024 campaign cycle and the first for this presidential campaign. Much as I would like to buck the conventional wisdom, the stakes are genuinely quite high. One poll I saw this morning showed a remarkably high, really impossibly high percentage of voters said that the debate would have a major impact on their vote: 30%. But as debate watchers we come back to a basic conundrum: if you’re paying enough attention to be worked up about the debate you are almost certainly not the intended audience. And not only are you not the intended audience but your experience of the campaign and politics generally is so totally different from that of the intended audience that absent a real suspension of disbelief, a real effort to separate yourself from your own impressions, you’ll have a hard time knowing how each candidate did for the audience that matters.
There is one significant exception to this claim: knowing who you are going to vote for is one thing, and your actual likelihood or certainty of voting is another. There’s how hard you work turning other people out to vote, whether and how determinedly you volunteer. In addition to the perhaps 10 or 15 percent of the electorate that is in any sense up for grabs, the debates function as big national pep rallies for each political team. That’s also important.
One thing that seems clear to me in the polls is that there is a significant asymmetry in Kamala Harris’ favor. To add to his numbers Donald Trump has to convince voters who do not like him to come over to his side. That’s a tough but not impossible proposition. Harris meanwhile has to convince people who generally have a favorable impression of her. That’s a much better position to be in.
You can see this in the relative favorability numbers I’ve pointed to a few times recently. You can see it indirectly in the generic ballot numbers which have been trending in the Democrats’ direction over the last month. The same dynamic shows up in some polls as part of more specific questions — a slice of voters saying they still don’t know enough about what Harris stands for.
All of this suggests Harris has substantially more people who are open to supporting her but need to be brought over the line. If that’s the case she needs to build herself up more than tear him down. Of course, tearing people down is really all Trump knows how to do. But in this debate more than others that really is his sole goal. There aren’t many more people he can get. He needs to make her unacceptable. He needs to take the small number of undecided voters and get them to reluctantly vote for him or simply not vote at all.
That may read as my saying she either shouldn’t or doesn’t need to attack Trump or get into it with him. But that’s not the case. A presidential campaign is always inevitably a binary choice. Successfully landing a blow against him is a win for her. She’s running as the protector of your rights. That’s inherently an attack on him while also playing her up. But the more general point is that her goal here isn’t destroying Trump or landing some epochal sick burn. She needs to demonstrate that she’s ready. She needs to seal the deal with the two or three percentage points of the electorate who will determine the outcome of the election by demonstrating that she can take him on and win. As we’ve discussed countless times before, presidential politics is about performances of dominance and power.
I’ve read a few commentaries this morning which hold that Harris’ central challenge tonight is explaining how her views on a number of issues have changed since 2019. Or she needs to explain her policy agenda. I don’t so much disagree with those argument as I think they’re over-determined. What I think is true is that despite being vice president for almost four years and having been the presidential nominee for six weeks Harris is still a new figure on the political scene. There are still voters who in good faith want a bit more sense of who she is and what a Harris presidency would be like.
Addressing her evolution since 2019 is part of that. Fleshing out a policy agenda is part of that. But we always face the danger of being over-literal. Most voters couldn’t tell you anything about what Harris said in 2019 apart from attack lines they may have heard on Fox News. Most voters couldn’t name specific policies beyond top-line big ticket things like for or against abortion, supports or opposes Obamacare, will lower or raise my taxes, will protect my rights. This applies all the more with swing voters who are only distantly aware of the whole national political process.
Fundamentally this comes down to trust, getting a clear impression of who Harris is, hearing the right answers to a few important questions and getting the sense that they’re a reliable custodian of national power. In other words, it’s all of these things. She’s still a pretty new player on the national scene. The impression she makes is important. I just think it’s a mistake to confuse that with policy literalism.
I do think there’s a decent chance a lot of people will get a wake up call tonight not only about how weird Donald Trump is but about how much he’s deteriorated. It’s been many years since he’s shared a debate stage with anyone who could be called a young and dynamic figure. But if you’re really sensitive to signs that Donald Trump is a sundowning degenerate freak, you wouldn’t be a swing voter. Tonight’s about Kamala Harris. That means risk but also opportunity. Tonight’s her night to seal the deal.