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I wanted to share a few more thoughts about last night’s debate. You can find my overnight wrap-up here.
There are two realities: First, the race is going to remain close. It’s going to be a slog right up to Election Day, and Trump could win. Second, Harris thoroughly dominated and even humiliated Trump from the first minutes of the debate right through to the end. These things are both true. We just don’t know exactly how those two realities are going to interact over the next two months as they combine with other developments, news cycles and possibly new shocks we can’t predict.
Kate and I just recorded this week’s podcast which was basically all about the debate. In those conversations there’s some urge to hold back on saying just how thoroughly Harris dominated him because you don’t want to sound too frothy or exuberant or give people any sense that that thoroughness will be reflected in changes in the polls. My best guess is that it may have a small impact on the horse race polls and drive some negative news cycles for Trump.
What seems more clear to me is that Harris remains in a solid position to win the presidency and has what amounts to a checklist of things she has to do to win. One of those things, maybe the biggest box on the checklist because the audience was biggest, was that she had to show up at that debate and show she could stand toe to toe with Donald Trump, not be overawed or dominated and give the small but critical slice of undecided voters a clearer sense of what kind of president she would be and what her positions are on key issues. She did that. That box is checked. The fact that she did much more than that, thoroughly dominated him, embarrassed him … that’s all icing on top of the cake. It feels great. And it serves the important purpose of energizing her supporters, which is also very critical. But how much that extra stuff drives the polls or the direction of the race I don’t think we can know. She had to do that thing as the first of several steps in consolidating support from remaining undecided voters. That’s my best stab at a sober evaluation of what happened last night.
What’s important now is that she needs to keep being the person she was in last night’s debate. Really the debate is the template for the next 60 days. Here’s what I mean. If you look back at the debate, the essential dynamic is that she kept attacking him and making him respond to her. She kept up the initiative and kept him on the defensive. That kept her in the dominant position, and, because she controlled the conversation, she could keep it on topics that worked for her. She needs to keep doing that now. Right now he’s flailing and on the ground. Keep hitting, keep forcing him to respond.