Debate? That's debatable
Facts were scarce and sleights were plentiful, as Harris and Trump squared off in what was supposed to be a debate. There were more insults than information, and we are the losers.
If you’re worried about your pets being eaten by Haitian immigrants, or about the government providing gender transition surgery to detained migrants, then last Tuesday evening’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was for you. If you are more concerned with facts, and what each party’s presidential candidate has in store for the country if elected—well maybe you should be glad you skipped it, or sorry you didn’t.
Social media, news sites, opinion writers, and editorial boards, have been consumed since last Tuesday with the question “who won?” Not surprisingly, 13 out of 14 New York Times columnists and opinion writers thought that Kamala Harris “won” the debate—mostly on “style” points—though they almost all described it as “meh,” or “sad” or “depressing.” Even right-leaning commentators were unimpressed with Trump’s performance. Barton Swain, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, wrote that “If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, which he might, we can count it as one more reminder that abysmal debate performances have often been overcome.”
But the more important question is not who “won” the debate, but who “lost.” The losers were anyone hoping to find out anything more about the candidates, especially Harris, other than what their advertisements or campaigns tell us. Trump has his four years as president to run on, and has been vocal—some say too vocal—about his policies on immigration, abortion, the economy, and the wars in Ukraine and Israel. You may not like them, but by now we pretty much know where he stands. Harris, on the other hand, remains mostly a mystery, even after almost four years as Vice President. Intentionally so.
She has come under increasing criticism from the press, and the Trump campaign, for avoiding interviews and dodging reporters questions. Since President Biden stepped away from the campaign in July, and she became the Democratic presidential candidate, she’s given only one interview—to a friendly CNN. Coming into the debate, New York Times Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote, “many reported that they didn’t know enough” about where Harris stands on the issues. “For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed … she mentioned a handful of plans she’d pursue if she won the White House. Yet we learned very few new details about those plans.”
Kim Strassel, another Wall Street Journal editorial board member, echoed Kingsbury’s disappointment with Harris’ lack of candor. “Viewers hoping this debate would be the moment Kamala Harris finally had to answer for a dismal Biden-Harris record were sorely disappointed. Ms. Harris deftly changed the subject on nearly every direct question she was asked, and neither the moderators nor Donald Trump pressed her on the omissions.”
It’s too soon to tell if the debate helped, or hurt, either Harris or Trump. It’s likely not to have changed many minds. “I actually am not sure that this changes much precisely because we didn't learn that much that we didn't know. We knew Harris was basically saying we knew that Trump is a maniac if you give him any room to run,” Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle said during a podcast. “What we don't know—what is her actual plan for taxing unrealized capital gains? What is she going to do about tax reform next year? What specific things, other than the $6,000 extended tax credit, is she going to do to realize her vision of moving forward into the future with joy?”
Swing wildly or jab and duck?
Some have compared the debate to a boxing match, and in some ways, that’s an apt comparison. Trump’s style was to swing wildly, hoping for a knockout—occasionally connecting, mostly not. Harris’ was content to jab (Trump) and duck (questions).
“As for Mr. Trump’s presentation Tuesday night, it was terrible,” the Wall Street Journal’s Swain wrote, “He let Kamala Harris provoke him to anger, ranted about the 2020 election, constantly interrupted his own assertions, and failed to capitalize on obvious vulnerabilities.” Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Peggy Noonan wrote that “Ms. Harris won shallowly. I mean not that she won on points, or that it was close—it wasn’t, she creamed him—but that she won while using prepared feints and sallies and pieces of stump speech, not by attempting to be more substantive or revealing.”
Trump, however, did have his moments. “But on a night when Harris set traps every which way for Trump (and he took the bait essentially every time),” the Times’ Kingsbury observed, “the one moment those tables were turned was when the former president asked her what she would do differently from the past three and a half years. Some voters may still be left looking for that answer.”
It isn’t only the candidates, however, who have come under public scrutiny for their performances. Debate moderators, ABC News broadcast journalists David Muir and Linsey Davis, have also been criticized for failing to follow-up evasive answers and for fact-checking Trump while refusing to do with same with Harris. Mark Penn, an adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton from 1995-2008, and Andrew Stein, the former New York City Council president, wrote in the New York Times that Muir and Davis “called Trump out on every falsehood but let Harris get away with one lie after another.”
This is not to say Muir and Davis weren’t right to challenge Trump when he exaggerated some fact or statistic, or failed to answer a question. It’s that they were wrong, actually derelict, not to go after Harris the same way. For example, Davis made sure to challenge Trump when he said that some states allow a baby to be “executed” after being born. “There is no state in this country,” she quickly corrected him, “where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
Yet when Harris said that Trump called neo-Nazis protesting in Charlottesville, Va., “very fine people,” or that he threatened a “bloodbath” if he loses the election, they failed to step in—even though these claims have been repeatedly debunked. They also failed, starting with the very first question, to follow-up on Harris’ non, or evasive, answers. This was to be the trend for the entire debate.
Muir began by asking “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” Harris responded by reminding voters she grew up “middle class,” and that she had a “plan to build what I call an opportunity economy,” though she never got around to explaining what that was. She then claimed that Trump was planning to give tax cuts to billionaires and that he supported what she called the “Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods.”
Rather than press Harris to actually answer the question of whether Americans are better off, or to clarify just what she means by “opportunity economy,” Muir instead said he wanted to “drill down” on Trump’s tariff plan as “many economists say that with tariffs at that level costs are then passed onto the consumer.” Fair question.
But why didn’t they also question Harris about the economists who have ridiculed her claim that high food prices are due to price-gouging grocers and that price-fixing groceries is the answer? Or, that she provided the deciding vote for the American Rescue Plan—which many economists blame for fueling inflation by dumping trillions in borrowed federal funds into an already recovering economy? That was just the first of many unanswered questions or unchallenged statements by Harris. It’s no excuse that Trump failed to follow-up as well.
“Time and again,” write Penn and Stein, “we find that supposedly neutral democratic institutions have been corrupted by bias. Debate moderators must check their biases and seek to be scrupulously fair, or they shouldn’t do the job … ABC undermined the system for everyone.”
Yes, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could teach CIA spymasters a thing or two about how to make it through an interrogation without divulging any meaningful information or revealing any plans. But that doesn’t absolve Muir and Davis from trying.
Let’s debate debates.
Do debates even matter when they’re not debates? Trump has said he won’t debate Harris again—and, not surprisingly, Harris has called for another debate. But if moderators don’t follow-up questions, and candidates give self-serving and evasive answers, or respond with unchallenged slogans, what’s the point?
The Biden-Trump debate back in July mattered—but only because Biden’s performance was more residential long-term care than presidential. “When it comes to vote choice,” according to Dustin Carnahan, professor of Communications at Michigan State University, “research has generally suggested little impact from watching debates. Debate viewers tend to be among the most politically engaged and thereby likely to have their minds made up well before the debate.”
That’s not so say that debates necessarily have no impact on voters—though their effect may be indirect. Potential voters may be influenced more by the after-debate media coverage than the debate itself. Which is why reporting free from bias is so important. “While more knowledgeable voters tend to learn more from viewing the actual debates,” Carnahan said, “less knowledgeable voters have been shown to narrow this gap in the days following debates due to debate-related content being hard to avoid even among those who are the least politically engaged.”
Prior to the debate Trump was complaining that the media is biased against him, but even among the right-leaning media the post-debate coverage has not been favorable. That’s likely one reason Trump has said he won’t debate Harris again.
Yet another might be that despite what many thought was a poor debate performance, Trump doesn’t seem to have suffered in the polls. According to the latest aggregate averages, Trump continues to lead (narrowly) in the key swing states of Arizona and Georgia, while Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Nevada remain essentially dead heats. So if debates don’t matter to voters, they aren’t going to matter to candidates.
If there was a debate winner, and that's debatable, it was likely the media. An estimated 67 million viewers tuned in for at least part of it. And despite being widely acknowledged by the media as the “winner,” Harris hasn’t seen the bump in the polls she must have hoped for. “So if anything's going to change between now and November,” Washington Post columnist Jim Geraghty said, “Harris needed to do something different, and I don't think she did that last night.”
From here on in, the race will be about turnout and winning over that sliver of as yet uncommitted voters. Neither Trump nor Harris, for different reasons, have given those voters a convincing reason to earn their vote. Trump for sometimes saying too much, and Harris for oftentimes saying too little.
“To the undecided voter this isn’t a simple choice between stability and peril,” writes New York Times columnist Ross Duothat, “It’s a choice between two candidates and coalitions that for different reasons don’t merit public confidence. And in a democracy, if you keep offering voters two bad options, you shouldn’t be surprised that they will often choose the one you are sure is worse.”