Observers were expecting a debate marked by the aggressiveness of Donald Trump, who is used to this practice, and facing a defensive Kamala Harris. In fact, the vice president was very combative and did not give in to her opponent’s attacks. So will this fierce television duel go down in history as the evening when the campaign changed?
When the two presidential candidates entered the television studio where they were dueling, Kamala Harris immediately went on stage and extended her hand to Donald Trump to shake hands, indicating that her self-confidence had not diminished throughout the debate.
Trump, who grew increasingly angry throughout the evening, stuck to his usual themes of denouncing US “decline” and regularly reminded his opponent that he held a senior US official responsible for that decline.
Both candidates undoubtedly won points with their supporters, but we will have to wait for the vote count to find out if they have managed to convince undecided voters. The Conversation US asked Rodney Coates, a sociologist at the University of Miami, and Lee Banville, a PBS NewsHour correspondent for 13 years who is now director of the Miami School of Journalism at the University of Montana and author of a book on presidential debates, to analyze the hour-and-a-half-long confrontation.
“The American people want better.”
Rodney Coates, an expert on racial issues at the University of Miami
From the beginning of the debate, Kamala Harris has openly voiced her vision of a more just society, while also openly opposing Donald Trump’s views on abortion, immigration and the American legal system.
“I want to lift people up, not tear them down,” he said.
Harris, a former prosecutor, repeatedly used Trump’s own words to criticize his work. Trump responded by resorting to personal attacks, calling Harris “the worst vice president in the history of our country” and saying she has no opinions other than those of her boss, President Joe Biden.
After ignoring Trump’s many attacks on Biden, Harris finally responded: “You’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me.”
During the televised duel, the former president refrained from any racist attacks against his opponent, despite not being shy in the weeks since Kamala Harris was inaugurated as the Democratic nominee. Some observers accused Trump of making racist attacks central to his campaign strategy. Trump claimed Harris had a “low IQ,” was “very stupid,” “weak” and “lazy.”
If Trump avoided that attack strategy this time, he couldn’t help but repeat a rumor that has since been proven false, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio kill and eat their pets, but when asked about Kamala Harris’ racial identity, he said he didn’t care.
“I read that he wasn’t black… and then I read that he was black,” he said. “It’s up to him to decide.”
Harris, for her part, has made it clear that she rejects any strategy that involves dividing individuals based on their actual or assumed racial affiliation.
“This is a tragedy,” he said, explaining that Trump has always tried to use race to divide the American people throughout his career. […] I think the American people want better.”
“What did people want?”
Lee Banville, professor and director of the journalism school at the University of Montana.
Too often, these debates boil down to a memorable sequence: a rhetorical turn of phrase that deals a major blow to an opponent, or an unintentional mistake that undermines a campaign for weeks. The first 30 minutes of Joe Biden’s June 28 debate against Trump are just the latest in a long line of pivotal moments that have had a major impact on campaigns.
But what does it take for a clumsy sentence to cause a political crisis, or a factual error to cost you a vote? What passages from that historic livestream will have more significant consequences than a few TikTok videos mocking two politicians?
It’s too early to make a definitive statement on that question, but a tirade from Trump could have a negative impact on the rest of his campaign: Trump has reiterated Roe v. Wade, assuring us that this is “what the people want”:
“All the lawyers, all the Democrats, all the Republicans, liberals, conservatives… all the people wanted this issue to go back to the states. And that’s what happened.”
Harris later took the phrase “the people wanted it” and used it against the former president.
“Do you want to talk about what people want? You think pregnant women want to carry their pregnancies to term when they’re at risk of miscarriage, and they know that the medical staff will refuse them treatment in the emergency room because they’re afraid of going to prison and they’ll have to bleed out. In a car in a parking lot? That’s not what they want. That’s not what their husbands want. And for a young girl who’s 12 or 13 years old and a victim of incest to have to carry her pregnancy to term? That’s not what people want,” she countered.
This was a political statement on a major campaign issue, but it was also a deeply personal statement. The sequence was comparable to other key moments in previous presidential debates: President Gerald Ford’s erroneous claim that Eastern Europe had been liberated from Soviet domination in 1976; President Ronald Reagan’s clever deflecting concerns about his opponent Walter Mondale’s (56) age by making a well-timed joke about his youth and inexperience in 1984; or President George H. W. Bush’s several glances at his watch during a public debate with his opponent Bill Clinton in 1992.
In 2008, I had the good fortune of working on a documentary called “Debating Our Destiny,” in which my boss, the late Jim Lehrer, who moderated 12 presidential debates, interviewed many former candidates about these very special moments. The first President Bush was particularly candid about his stance during his 1992 debate against Bill Clinton:
“You look at your watch and immediately they tell you, ‘He shouldn’t run again.’ It bothers him. He’s out of the picture, he’s not interested in any of this and we need a change. I’m glad this argument is over, to tell you the truth. Yes. Maybe that’s why I was looking at my watch and saying I only have ten minutes left for this nonsense.”
Bill Clinton also shared his views on why this moment is etched in our memories: “If the vigil upset Bush so much, it is because it tends to reinforce the problem he faced during the campaign.”
In other words, debate segments that emphasize a campaign theme that is already present in voters’ minds are particularly likely to have a profound impact on election outcomes.
What will be the results of an exchange like the one Trump and Harris had on abortion? Will the gun exchange encourage more voters to support Harris? Or will it quickly fade into the background for other themes, such as economic issues or immigration policy?
