General
The Debate Was About Trump. That Was Good for Harris.
It can be hard to tell when a debate bounce will last, but there are rough parameters that can guide us.
The debate as seen at a bar in downtown Philadelphia on Tuesday.Credit…Graham Dickie/The New York Times
On Monday’s episode of “The Daily,” I was asked what we should look for during Tuesday’s debate. Here’s what I said:
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.
