Two days after rambling incoherently about pets being eaten and babies being executed after they’re born, Donald Trump announced that he would not debate Kamala Harris for a second time, claiming, absurdly, that he was the victor of Tuesday night’s proceedings.
In a post on Truth Social, the GOP nominee told his followers: “When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH.’ Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate. She and Crooked Joe have destroyed our Country, with millions of criminals and mentally deranged people pouring into the USA, totally unchecked and unvetted, and with Inflation bankrupting our Middle Class. Everyone knows this, and all of the other problems caused by Kamala and Joe – It was discussed in great detail during the First Debate with Joe, and the Second Debate with Comrade Harris…. KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!”
In truth, Harris’s team called for a second debate likely because they saw how deftly she nailed the ex-president, with the VP managing to lay out her vision for the country while making the former guy look small and unhinged. While it’s not clear how much of an impact her debate performance will have on voters who haven’t already made up their minds, it’s more than clear that the majority of debate-watchers believe Harris won, and that it wasn’t even close. A CNN poll showed the VP winning the debate 63% to Trump’s 37%, while a YouGov poll put her at 54% to 31%.
Meanwhile, a Morning Consult election poll conducted the day after the debate found the Democratic nominee leading Trump by five points, while:
Trump, on the other hand, lost support. Ahead of the debate, 46% of respondents said they would cast their ballot for the former president if the election were held today. After Tuesday’s debate, that decreased to 45%.
A majority of Harris’s support comes from Democrats, but she leads Trump among independent voters with 46% support to his 40%, the survey found.
“It’s too early to say whether Harris’s debate performance is the key driver of our latest head-to-head numbers, as our short-term trends suggest she was already building momentum ahead of Tuesday’s televised matchup,” Morning Consult analysts wrote. Still, that debate performance, which was widely seen as successful, will help her sustain that momentum, they wrote.
So yeah, there’s a reason a second Harris-Trump showdown isn’t happening (for now), but it’s probably not that the VP thinks she lost.
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The post Donald Trump, Who Is Definitely Not Scared to Face Off With Kamala Harris Again, Says He Won’t Debate Her a Second Time appeared first on Vanity Fair.