On Monday’s episode of “The Daily,” I was asked what we should look for during Tuesday’s debate. Here’s what I said:
One easy way to look at the debate is just whether it’s fundamentally about Harris or whether it’s fundamentally about Trump.
If after the debate, we’re talking about Harris’s flip-flops on the issues, or whether she’s too far to the left, or her handling of immigration, she’s in trouble. She’s not going to win the election on any of those issues. The most she can do is be able to move past them: to be able to sort of satisfy those concerns enough to focus on Trump.
If we’re talking instead about Donald Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, his views on abortion, Project 2025, if we’re talking about his behavior, like was the case after the first presidential debate in 2020, that’s a sign that not only did Harris sort of satisfy these concerns that we’ve been talking about, but she allowed the election to pivot toward Trump.
In the end, Harris needs this election to be about Donald Trump for her to win. She has to be able to satisfy those concerns about her, and turn the election back to him.
By this measure, the outcome of Tuesday’s debate is clear enough.
You probably knew the debate was about Donald J. Trump if you simply watched it. The numbers show it as well: Mr. Trump spoke for longer than Vice President Kamala Harris, and she nonetheless spent more time attacking him than the other way around. Or put differently: Mr. Trump spent most of the debate on defense.
It’s worth reflecting on the significance of this dynamic. All year, Democrats assumed they would win the election by making the contest a simple up-or-down referendum on Mr. Trump, just as they did in 2020 and 2022. It’s difficult to overstate just how much the Biden campaign and Democrats took this assumption for granted, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. It was practically the only theory for how President Biden would win. And it all fell apart when the first debate proved, once and for all, that a Biden-Trump rematch would be as much a referendum on Mr. Biden’s fitness for office as Mr. Trump’s conduct.
For 90 minutes, Ms. Harris finally managed to do the one thing Democrats assumed they would do all along. The early indications are that it helped as they hoped, as the first CNN/SSRS poll taken after the debate showed that viewers thought Ms. Harris won by a comfortable margin.
Whatever you think personally, the result will shape the media conversation in the coming days. Not only will people hear that Ms. Harris won, but much more time will also be spent explaining her victory — whether it was about her own preparation or Mr. Trump’s difficulties on abortion or how immigrants were “eating the cats.”
Oh, Taylor Swift endorsed her, too.
What’s next?
The candidate who wins the post-debate polls tends to gain in the race thereafter. Sometimes, it’s a shift that lasts for the rest of the race; other times, it fades.
Of course, it’s hard to know whether a post-debate bounce will last. In recent memory, the most lasting post-debate shifts — toward John Kerry in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012 — each featured a relatively lesser known candidate performing well on the stage. In each case, the debate followed the opponent’s convention: The standing of these lesser known candidates may have been a little low, and the debate helped them reassemble support that may have been waiting for them all along.
The shifts that didn’t last — gains by Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden in 2016 and 2020 — came after debates when Mr. Trump was seen as performing poorly. He repelled many would-be Trump supporters, but it seems many or most returned to his side as memories of the debate faded.
On top of all of this, there’s the possibility that post-debate movement in the polls may simply result from changes in the relative likelihood of Democrats or Republicans to respond to surveys. There’s evidence to support this possibility.
Leaving “phantom swings” aside, is this debate more like the cases where bounces fade, or where bounces last? Neither is a perfect fit. Mr. Trump wasn’t seen as performing especially well, but did he perform so disastrously that his supporters are likely to peel away? And Ms. Harris entered the debate as the comparatively unknown candidate, but her support didn’t seem to be deflated in the wake of her convention. It’s also not obvious that she addressed voters’ core concerns about her: like a better understanding of what she believes, whether she’s too far to the left, or whether she will be a change from the Biden administration.
In this narrow respect, the debate falls somewhat in between the two possibilities I described in my pre-debate take for “The Daily.” The debate was about Mr. Trump, but Ms. Harris probably still has work to do to satisfy voters’ concerns. We’ll see what voters say when the next round of polls comes out in the coming days and weeks.
The post The Debate Was About Trump. That Was Good for Harris. appeared first on New York Times.