Consider the full gravity of Kamala Harris’ challenge in Tuesday’s debate. She is half black and half Indian in a predominantly white nation where they are increasingly fearful about being less than a majority by 2042. Her opponent is an alpha male, Donald Trump, who lives in a society that is more masculine than any other “advanced” country.
Harris ran a disastrous campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020. She is remembered for opposing left-wing policies like universal health care and the decriminalization of illegal immigration, and fracking. She was the vice president of a president who had become extremely unpopular due to high inflation and failed immigration controls, one of the most ambiguous jobs in the country.
She did not go through the difficulties of a nominating party primary, where her policies, positions and personality would be defined. She was made a household name contender less than 100 days before the eve of the election. She is not the left wing of 2020. She cannot position herself to take up the mantle of Biden’s legacy, because doing so would be electoral suicide. Her biggest problem is that people do not know enough about her or her ideas.
Most people don’t know who Kamala really is
He got off to a great start at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August, but a NYT/Siena poll on the eve of the debate let him down. Nearly a third of those surveyed said they don’t know enough about him or his policies, while only 5% said the same for Trump. About 36% felt he was too “progressive,” while 28% felt Trump was too “conservative.” 97% of those who voted for Trump in 2020 said they would vote for him again. His base of non-college educated, elderly, rural and evangelicals remains very strong.
Before going into the debate, this was the swing vote in the “Arjuna Eye” of both Trump and Harris. About 18 million of the 161 million American voters in the US are registered as “undecided”. Of those, it is estimated that the swing vote is 7% in seven states. Now observers have narrowed the swing vote to 50,000 from five states.
For that narrow target audience – for anyone other than MAGA (Make America Great Again) Devotee – There is no doubt that Harris won the debate. Strengthening her convention profile, she was fully aware of the power and prestige of the presidency; as someone who engages with policies and solutions, and seeks to represent all Americans, including Republicans; as someone who values freedom in its broadest sense, including women’s rights over their own bodies; as someone who wants to lead Americans out of their recent contentious past and into a future of opportunity.
Kamala surprised
She was well-prepared by a team that, unlike Biden’s group, included disillusioned former members of Trump’s core team. She had her own list of talking points and made sure she ticked them all, regardless of the questions she was asked. She made no attempt to defend Biden’s record on his most bleak legacies, but passionately defended the regime’s record on healthcare and NATO support for Ukraine. Her policy prescriptions were as vague – “What does an economy of opportunity mean?” – as the DNC’s, but she was over the top in her zeal on abortion.
Most importantly, he repeatedly provoked Trump on all his favorite things, bringing out the worst in him. He did this brilliantly right from his opening statement, telling the audience to expect the “same old tactics and a bunch of lies.” To their delight, Trump fell into every single trap he laid.
He said people left his rallies out of “boredom and exhaustion”; as expected, Trump roared that his rallies were the “greatest ever.” He said that the world leaders he met as vice president laughed at Trump; how easily he could be swayed by flattery; that they called him “deplorable.” He shouted into the microphone that “strong” world leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Urban say the world has fallen apart after Trump; how the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza would never have happened if he were president; how he would end the wars in “24 hours” by blowing off the heads of all the combatants the day he became president.
How Trump missed opportunities
Her pitch against Trump was on the results of the 2020 election. In response to a question from the moderator, Trump reiterated that he had not accepted that he lost the last election. Harris pressed on, saying he had been “outvoted” by 81 million voters, and that his attempts to review the vote had been turned down by more than 60 courts. She emphasized how his refusal to process the fact that he had in fact lost the election casts doubt on whether “this candidate standing to my right” has the cognitive capacity to accept the facts, and that the American people deserve better from their chief executive.
Trump was so nervous that he barely noticed Harris’s weaknesses, even though he could have stabbed her with a knife. He repeatedly said that “Biden was the worst president of the United States and she was the worst vice president”, and he criticized the Biden administration for the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left behind $85 billion worth of new weapons. But he failed to corner her on the vacillations in many of her policies, the affordability crisis in American families over the price of groceries, housing and healthcare, the Biden administration’s inability to end the war in Gaza or cripple Russia’s economy over the invasion of Ukraine, or prevent China from gaining superiority in strategic technologies.
On the issue of abortion, where he was on the defensive, he could have hurt Harris deeply by pointing out that in Minnesota there are no restrictions on what stage of pregnancy women seeking abortions can choose to have an abortion. In fact, Trump mentioned Minnesota Governor and Harris’s vice presidential candidate Tom Walz when beginning his answer on abortion, but he made only a vague reference to Walz and then lost his way. Instead, he accused Democrats of allowing unwanted babies to be “killed” after birth, only to be corrected by a fact-checking moderator.
chopping off one’s own feet
As Harris predicted, Trump raised the issue of immigration even when the question wasn’t about that. He repeatedly railed at “millions and millions of criminals and lunatics” invading the country and made the fantastic claim that this “invasion” would lead to World War III.
In his first mention of immigration in the debate, he, as expected, repeated the lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s cats and dogs. But, again, a fact-check by the moderator revealed that city officials had completely denied the story. The next day, the parents of the boy whose story had sparked the lie spread by right-wing media and brought to national attention by a tweet from J.D. Vance called on the Republican to back off.
Did Trump underestimate Kamala?
There is no doubt that Harris got the debate she wanted in her dreams. Trump was either completely unprepared or perhaps not prepared at all. New York Post A reporter who has met him for the past 10 years was shocked to learn in a recent meeting that Trump had no idea Harris’s upbringing had anything to do with her Marxist-economics professor father. His staff told her she was not being briefed.
It was evident in the debate that Trump still hasn’t come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t given a chance to take revenge on Biden. Realising this, a fiery Harris reminded him in the debate that he is not contesting against Biden, further creating an image of him as someone who is out of touch with reality. The debate hadn’t even ended when Taylor Swift tweeted that she was supporting Harris, identifying herself as a “cat lady”, a reference to Vance’s rhetoric against “cat ladies”. Swift’s support, which has been on air since the DNC, will sway some of the youth vote.
A trip to the ‘Spin Room’
There was some more cheer in the air for Harris. News broke that Trump had visited the “spin room” immediately after the debate. This is a room where a candidate’s media team gathers to issue rebuttals and clarifications, assess the response and stir up social media, knowing that it is the memes and clips played repeatedly that amplify the debate’s impact among fans and critics. Candidates usually never visit the “spin room” after a debate.
The next morning brought further confirmation for Harris when Trump attacked her. ABChost of the debate. He accused the moderator of being biased because he conducted several fact-checks, which the channel had announced it would do, unlike other media hosts in the past. Trump said the moderator should be criminally prosecuted and the channel’s license should be revoked.
This was the final proof that Harris had been completely successful in her aim of bringing him under her influence.
Harris’s first round
Will there be another debate? Harris needs the huge audience that comes to these debates — Tuesday’s debate was watched by 67 million people — to present her personable and confident image to voters. Democrats have let it be known that they want another debate. Trump may not be able to resist the opportunity to take revenge on a candidate he denounces more in private than he does in public.
This election will depend on countless anonymous assessments of which candidate’s character is better suited to become the next president of the United States, based on fleeting and superficial opinions by people with little interest in politics. Harris’s team won this gladiatorial contest, but the war will continue in full swing until November 5.
(Ajay Kumar is a senior journalist. He is former managing editor of Business Standard and former executive editor of The Economic Times.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal views of the author
