Given that nowadays campaigns can put vast amounts of policy proposals and details on the internet, debates are not the place to unveil new ones or discuss them in depth. At this stage of the election season, debates are unlikely to cause voters to switch allegiances. There is the persistent belief in the media that there are these genuinely undecided voters who look to the debates to help them make a choice. But such people are probably very few. Most ‘undecided’ voters are already leaning towards one candidate or another and the best one can do is to retain them.
The main goal of these debates is to energize supporters of your candidate and depress the emotions of those of your rival. The June 27th debate caused many Democrats to feel that they were going to lose with Joe Biden as their candidate, so in that sense creepy Donald Trump achieved that goal. The problem was that he was too successful in that Biden dropped out and was replaced by Kamala Harris who has completely turned that enthusiasm gap around. Creepy Trump cannot be blamed for not anticipating this possibility, given that it was unprecedented. I had long ago given up the idea that the Democratic nominee could be anyone other than Biden and had resigned myself to the possibility that, bar some kind of miracle, he would slowly drift into defeat in November. But such a miracle did occur.
I do not expect Harris to fumble and stumble in the debate. She is too articulate, smart, and disciplined for that to occur.
Debates like this are more about optics and perceptions and less about substance. In such a debate, your goal should be to have your opponent on the defensive, so what she likely will try to do is to put creepy Trump on the back foot by pointing out all his lies and getting him to defend all the indefensible things that he and his running mate weird JD Vance have said. If she can also needle him to go off a tangential rant, and spew venomous nonsense, so much the better. She also comes across as personable and engaging. Efforts by the GOP to make her laugh unlikable have not gained any traction. If she can get him to scowl and look even more angry than usual, while she looks calm and happy to be there, that would be an added bonus. People respond well to those whom they think are in control of the situation and an angry person does not fit the bill.
Here is a new ad that the Harris campaign has put out today in advance of the debate, laughing at creepy Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes. It is clearly meant to get under his skin.
And here is another new ad showing a few of the many top people in government during the time he was president, people he appointed, saying that he is unfit to lead.
It’s all part of the mind games.
As others have noted, and I think Harris is well aware, as cathartic as it might be to troll Trump to get him wound up, at the debate itself Harris’ best approach is probably to ignore Trump as much as possible. You’re never going to be able to fact check all the lies he spews out, so for the most part don’t even try, focus on what to do instead that’s contrary to what Trump said.
Because ignoring and dismissing most of what he says as irrelevant will still get Trump wound up because he absolutely hates when the attention is not on him, while at the same time letting Harris look like the adult in the room.
I think no matter what happens in the debate everyone should just say Trump is old and tired, he just repeats the same old lies, and is losing his marbles more visibly (heck no one even has to lie to say this!) -- there is no need to cover what he actually says.
Here’s two things I’d love to see Kamala do.
1. After his first word salad, say “Are you okay? Because that made absolutely no sense. It’s just a word salad.” And then counter his points.
2. Start off by saying, “Here’s your cognitive test. Here are three words: Elephant, cabin, saw. I’ll ask you later to see how well your remember them.” And then later, ask him to repeat them. And if he refuses, say “You don’t remember them, do you?!?”. You’re not competent to be President.
Just one minute ago, Trump started ranting sbout the size of his rallies.
😄
The moderators are useless.
But Trump is ranting, never answeing questions and talking about things not relsted to the questions but about things he is obsessed with. He certainly does not come across as a stateman while Harris keeps her calm all the time.
It is pretty much as I expected it to unfold.
Harris was prepared and preemptively called out that Trump was going to repeat the same out tired lies. She had trouble landing solid blows on his lies, partially the moderators fault. She mentioned Project 2025 multiple times but didn’t try to explain how it’s connected to Trump.
Harris did well on abortion, a position where Trump is very weak.
Harris did very well baiting Trump on the issue of rally size. Trump went into a rant that was silly.
Trump was well prepared for this debate. Whoever planned it scripted his responses well and hammered them into his head enough he stayed on script the whole way. They also prepared him with a tactic of waiting until the end of his response time to throw in the blatant lies and attacks. This sticks Harris between jumping off topic or ignoring them.
Trump relentlessly came back to the immigration topic. He obviously sees this as his winning issue. Harris did not counter him well but I doubt it’s the winning issue he thinks it is.
Trump returned to claiming he won in 2020 but didn’t raise his points well, largely because he has none.
He came across badly on Afghanistan also where he tried to pin all the blame on the Biden administration. It was enough for Harris to point out that the treaty was negotiated by Trump, Biden just stuck to it.
He attacked Biden several times and Harris didn’t have a good response, the only issue where I think Harris failed.
He jumped into some hugely racist lies and brought up the current lies about animals being killed by immigrants. This was something so silly Harris barely had to respond and she largely ignored it and went into his deeper racism.
The moderators did badly. They did not cut Trump off aggressively enough and let him interject without giving Harris time to reply. They needed to either cut him off immediately or give Harris a chance to respond. They slipped up and called Trump president once. The questions were very predictable. I don’t expect anything really off beat but some creativity would be nice.
Overall Harris did better but Trump didn’t fail either. Both sides will probably be OK with the outcome.
“The moderators are useless.”
I don’t know. They actually fact checked him on a couple of his most flagrant lies.