By Dave Andrusko
As you’d expect, the Internet has gone wild following Tuesday’s presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris. Most of the content is predictable, given the writer’s bent, but not all.
For instance, there’s CNN’s Jake Tapper, who co-moderated the debate between pro-abortion Joe Biden and Trump in June and received praise for his and Dana Bash’s even-handedness. Yesterday Tapper tapped into a key component of Harris’s debate strategy: starting off saying she would answer the question later in her two minutes but never answering the query.
Fox News’s Alexander Hall wrote
“On Wednesday, Tapper said Harris was less than forthcoming about her policies, beginning the debate “by punting the first question on the economy.”
“It went on from there,” Tapper said after playing a clip of her response. “Despite the economy being the number one issue facing the country, the sitting vice president generally reverted to talking points about a few of her policy proposals. Even Harris allies today are saying that she needs to talk more about what she will do for Americans if elected.”
Harris was likewise evasive in her answers about the crisis at the border and the Israel-Hamas war stalemate, to name just two examples.
The headline for CNN’s senior political commentator conservative Scott Jennings was “Trump missed the moment. But he’s in better shape at this juncture than in 2016, 2020.”
Jennings picked up on the theme that Trump was in a far position in 2024 than his numbers in 2016 and 2020 and gently took moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis to task for their blatant double standard.
He argued Trump started off fast but stumbled over a question about one of his best issues–immigration. He was derailed when Harris, instead of directly answering, challenged him about the size of his rallies. “And from that point forward Harris largely dictated the flow of the debate,” Jennings wrote.
He added,
The moderators for ABC did come prepared to keep Trump in check, time and again fact-checking him while ignoring some of Harris’ whoppers. (She repeated the “bloodbath” lie once again, and the moderators allowed it, as an example. When Trump used that term, he was talking about the American automotive industry and what would happen under continued Democratic policies instead of his.)
To most Republicans, it felt like Trump was playing something of a road game with home cooking from locally hired refs. One Republican texted me that the debate felt more like a trial of Trump with three prosecutors instead of a debate between two candidates.
According to Jennings, Trump remains in a strong position to win. “But the debate offered him perhaps his best chance to cement his position in the campaign, and, like his somewhat disappointing convention speech, he missed a moment.”
Finally, there is Ruy Teixeira, a Democrat who has long warned his party that it has a genuine and hefty problem with working class Americans, those who have not gone to college. His headline is “Harris’s Working-Class Problem: The Democratic Achilles’ heel remains.”
“I refer to the need to boost support among the working class, which remains a serious weak spot for the Democrats and Harris,” Teixeira writes. “The latest New York Times/Siena poll has Harris trailing Trump among working-class (noncollege) voters by 17 points. That’s identical to Biden’s working-class deficit in the last NYT poll before he dropped out and way worse than Biden’s deficit among these voters in 2020—a mere 4 points.
“More detailed NYT results reveal that Harris, relative to Biden in 2020, is doing 10 points worse among white working-class voters and 18 points worse among nonwhite working-class voters. The latter is despite considerable improvement for Harris among this demographic since Biden dropped out.” [Emphasis added.]
The remainder of Teixeira’s fascinating substack gives further evidence of the Democrats’ working-class problem. For instance, “Besides the data noted above, polling right after the debate found that Harris did little to improve voter confidence in her ability to handle the all-important issue of the economy. A CNN flash poll among debate-watchers found that before the debate voters trusted Trump over Harris on the economy by 16 points and after the debate they favored Trump by….20 points.”
More tomorrow as we continue to reflect on the debate and what are the real lessons to be learned.