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Donald Trump boasts that he won the debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.
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But the former president’s actions show that he doesn’t really believe that declaration.
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On Wednesday afternoon, Trump’s words were by no means the only sign of his defeat.
It was a bad sign for former President Donald Trump when his campaign declared victory while his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was underway.
Like his premature declaration in the wee hours after Election Day 2020, it inspired desperation, not confidence.
By Wednesday morning, there were plenty of signs that Trump was losing his debate against Harris. It might not even be close.
Despite the reputation he built in the GOP primary debates, Trump has struggled in the general election. Gallup famously showed him losing all three debates against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. His first debate against then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2020 is widely considered one of the worst debates of all time.
It remains to be seen how much Tuesday’s debate will matter. Surveys have shown that the debates have little impact on the election, but even in an era of close races, there is very little separating Trump and Harris in the small swing states that decide the presidency.
Trump, of course, still won the White House in 2016 despite his struggles against Clinton. But once again, largely by his own doing, he has put his campaign in a difficult spot.
Here are the signs Trump added to his debate loss total.
The prediction market gave Harris a slight edge.
As the debate began, Trump held a narrow lead in PolyMarket, a crypto-based betting market advised by election prognosticator Nate Silver. At the end of the 90-minute match, Harris emerged as the favorite at the end of the day for the first time in more than two weeks. However, his lead did not last long, as on Wednesday afternoon Trump was narrowly ahead again.
Prediction markets are far from perfect. As Vox reported, in 2020, among PolyMarket’s competitors, PredictIt traders at one point gave Clinton the third-highest chance of winning the Democratic nomination even though she wasn’t running.
Prediction markets operate on shaky legal ground in the United States, so their user base may not reflect the actual population that controls their results. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates derivatives, has gone back and forth with PredictIt over its operations. In May, the government regulator decided to explicitly ban defacto betting from the policy altogether.
There are some advantages. Traditional, qualitative polls are less responsive to events affecting the actual election. Such events can irritate pollsters if they occur while their research is already in progress, potentially leading to a sample of voters coming to the table with very different experiences.
Trump’s beloved stock market isn’t any better.
May be an even better measure than the forecast market. With Trump’s willingness to mix business with politics, his initials are once again a publicly traded asset. Share prices of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, fell on Wednesday.
Traders have indicated that they sell shares of the struggling company when there is negative news about Trump.
According to a CNN poll, Trump lost by a fairly wide margin.
To compensate for the delay of traditional polls, TV networks often conduct so-called “snap or flash polls” immediately after the debates to catch the viewers of the debate. The poll is designed to target only voters who watched the debate — the many Americans who vote but can watch only part of it or not at all. Historically, such polls can also reflect the biases of supporters who feel a candidate will win the debate.
According to a CNN quick poll, Harris won the debate by a margin of 63 to 37 percent. In likely response, shortly after the debate, Trump began posting various screenshots of unscientific polls on X on Truth Social. Trump has long loved this type of straw poll.
The Murdoch Media Empire was not pleased either.
Media properties owned by Rupert Murdoch could not help but send and convey signals of Harris’ victory.
Immediately afterward, Fox News’ lead political analyst Brit Hume stated online: “Make no mistake, Trump had a bad night.”
The New York Post’s front page ran a headline describing Trump as a “rabble rouser.”
And the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, long considered the voice of the establishment wing of the GOP, also saw Harris as the winner.
“Councilwoman Harris, who was less well-known than the former president, had the most to gain, and we’re guessing she helped herself. She clearly won the debate, though not because she justified her views or her record over the last four years,” the editorial board wrote.
Instead, the board concluded that Harris simply won by knocking out Trump.
“Harris set a trap, so he spent a lot of the debate talking about the past or Joe Biden or immigrants eating pets, but not how he would improve the lives of Americans over the next four years.”
Trump and his allies blamed ABC
Before the debate ended, Trump campaign officials chided ABC News for directly refuting some of Trump’s claims by moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis.
“3 to 1, just as expected,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller wrote to X during the conversation.
Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s eldest son, added: “Strange how the hack moderators at @abcnews just ‘check’ Trump and let the Horrible lie non-stop. Fake news is the enemy of the people!”
Their complaints gave the impression of a frustrated coach lashing out at the officials rather than accepting his team’s blame for the loss.
See what it got Taylor Swift to do.
Taylor Swift, the biggest star on the planet, left the sidelines and endorsed Harris minutes after the debate ended. Swift’s support was always expected, but her silence led some fans to theorize that she could drop out of the 2024 race.
That he announced his acceptance right after the debate only added to the narrative that Democrats were ready to flog the football. Harris’ campaign claimed it was surprised by the timing of Swift’s announcement.
Trump backs out of rematch.
Before Biden dropped out of the race, Trump teased the president for months about the talks. After going back and forth with Harris, Trump said he wanted three meetings with him. Some Trump allies still believe another conversation will happen.
But for now, Trump is running away from his former bravado — boasting like Apollo Creed that there will be no rematch.
“In the world of boxing or the UFC, when a fighter gets hit or knocked down, they stand up and yell, ‘I DEMAND A RE-FIGHT, I DEMAND A RE-FIGHT!’ Well, it’s no different with a debate. He was beaten badly last night,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday afternoon. “In every poll we’re WINNING, in one case 92-8, so why would I do a rematch?”
To be fair, Creed, Rocky Balboa’s fictional nemesis, won their first fight. Then again, Creed famously loses the rematch and his title by a decisive margin.
Fittingly, the Trump-Harris debate took place in Philadelphia.
Read the original article on Business Insider
