PHILADELPHIA — Tuesday night’s debate was the most resounding affirmation yet that Democrats did the right thing in pushing Joe Biden aside in favor of his vice president.
It was no wonder that Trump, in his fury, kept trying to bring the conversation back to Biden, fuming at one point, “They threw him out of the campaign like a dog. We don’t even know. Is he our president? We have a president that doesn’t know he’s alive.”
“It is important to remind the former president," Harris retorted, “you’re not running against Joe Biden. You are running against me.”
Showing the preparation and skills of a former prosecutor, Harris made a forceful case against Trump — most passionately, attacking him on abortion, immigration and foreign policy. At one point, Harris said world leaders are “laughing at” Trump.
Under the debate rules, the candidates’ microphones were muted when it was not their turn to talk, but on the telecast’s split screen, Harris’s shaking head and expressions of incredulity delivered stinging blows. And this time, it was the glowering Trump who showed his age.
Harris clearly knew where his tender spots were. The discipline that Trump managed to maintain at the outset disintegrated when Harris brought up a subject around which his ego appears particularly fragile: the size of the crowds that the two candidates draw. Lately, hers have been at least as large as his.
“He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer,” Harris said. “And what you will also notice is people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”
It was at that point Trump began spewing unfounded claims that animate his rallies — including, most bizarrely, a new one that Haitian migrants in Ohio are abducting and eating household pets. They were, as Harris noted in a preemptive strike earlier in the debate, the “same old tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name calling.”
This was Trump’s seventh presidential debate, but whatever lessons he learned from his earlier outings did not show against an opponent arguably more deft than any he has faced previously.
The stakes were high. This probably will be the only face-off between the two candidates — who had never even met before appearing onstage together on Tuesday. It is likely to be the largest audience for either between now and the Nov. 5 election.
An estimated 51.27 million people watched the June 27 debate between Trump and Biden — a dramatic drop-off from the record 84 million who watched the first one between Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. Campaign strategists say far greater numbers get their impressions from subsequent news coverage and clips of the highlights that circulate on social media.
After Biden’s disastrous performance in June, the vice president’s elevation to the top of the ticket under unprecedented circumstances consolidated the Democratic base and brought a surge of enthusiasm that restored the race to a statistical tie. But there have been signs in some recent polls that Harris’s momentum has slowed. Whether her strong debate performance will change that remains to be seen.
One of Harris’s challenges, which she met head on, has been introducing and defining herself to the relatively small sliver of the electorate that is actually in play in a polarized, closely divided country, where the vast majority of voters are fixed in their party loyalties. Despite the fact that she has served as the nation’s vice president for more than three years, 31 percent of likely voters in a New York Times-Siena College poll this month said they needed to learn more about her; only 12 percent felt that way about Trump. She clearly attempted to address that on Tuesday by making repeated references to her life story.
It is also tricky for Harris to run on the record of the current administration and present herself as a candidate of change. And Harris, it should be pointed out, also dodged some of the questions that the ABC News moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, put to her. She did not explain why, if Trump’s tariffs are as destructive to the economy as she claims, the Biden administration has left them in place.
Trump supporters also noted that the moderators fact-checked the former president in real time but let some questionable assertions by the vice president slide by unchallenged. “It was three on one,” said Trump adviser David Bossie afterward. “The debate moderators put their thumbs on the scales for her.”
But while Harris should be dinged some points here and there, those are not likely to be what the American people will take from this debate. In nearly every respect, the night belonged to her.
