Kamala Harris Won the Debate, But Maybe Not the Election

When I was in the polling business many years ago, our reports always started with the mood of the electorate, whether things were moving in the right direction or seriously off on the wrong track, then moved to two sections on character and issues.

Usually those sections were pretty balanced. We advised candidates on which character traits and issue stands worked for them and which did not. We suggested how they could emphasize their strengths and address or pivot away from their weaknesses.

However, there's not much need for such a balanced approach in this presidential election, or about the candidates' first and possibly only television debate, the one on ABC News on Sept. 10. With only minor exceptions, character traits work for Vice President Kamala Harris. And with only minor exceptions, issue stands work for former President Donald Trump.

So the obvious debate strategy for Trump would have been to hammer home his advantages on issues, starting with two issues on which voters give dismal grades to the Biden-Harris administration, then going on to the raft of issues on which Harris, in her previous campaign for president, took stands widely unpopular during this one.

From time to time, and succinctly in his closing statement, Trump did this. But he also went off on alarums and excursions, which, however entertaining for his rally audiences, seemed distracting or puzzling for the moveable voters whose votes he needs.

He took up valuable time, for example, trying to insist that no one has been leaving his rallies early. He cited Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a controversial figure for those who follow these things and unknown to most others, as a supportive leader. He engaged in an extended debate over whether he really lost the 2020 election.

As Fox News' Brit Hume noted, Harris "baited him successfully, which is the story of the debate in my view." Such diversions point to character weaknesses: an unwillingness to focus, a preoccupation with personal slights, and a lack of discipline. In contrast, Harris was clearly well prepared and disciplined in reciting favorably worded phrases.

"We're not going back," Harris said at one point. "It's time to turn the page." That's absurd from one point of view. Nothing she said indicated that a Harris-Walz administration's policies would be much different from the Biden-Harris administration's. But her words do point to what a majority of voters have found troubling about Trump's character.

Harris benefited as well from the ABC moderators' erroneous fact-checking when they argued that no one favors ninth-month abortions, that the Springfield city manager must be a conclusive source of events there, and that violent crime rates declined sharply in 2021 and 2022.

But media partiality to Democrats is just one of several asymmetrical factors in politics. It's more enduring than the Republicans' Electoral College edge in 2016 and 2020, for Democrats had an edge there in 2004 and 2012. But a disciplined Republican candidate should expect media bias and should be prepared with brief and persuasive ripostes. Trump wasn't.

To their credit, the ABC moderators, after raising the Harris-favoring abortion issue early, then asked why she -- actually, anonymous campaign staff tweeters -- has renounced her 2019 presidential campaign promises to ban fracking, institute mandatory gun buybacks, and decriminalize illegal border crossings.

After perfunctorily repeated, obviously rehearsed lines about how she had sort of supported fracking, she segued into comparing her "middle-class" childhood to Trump's, citing her underwhelming proposals to increase homeownership, and mentioning a high school friend assaulted by a stepfather and her work "protecting seniors from scams." Not just a word salad but a whole buffet, with a dash of Tabasco to provoke her opponent.

CNN's instant poll on who won the debate has Harris ahead 63% to 37%. This is almost the exact opposite of the CNN count on the June 27 debate, which had Trump ahead of President Joe Biden 67% to 33%, and may hearten Harris backers.

But the result is in line with the average of polls taken immediately after the five presidential debates in September and October 2016 and 2020: Fifty-nine percent thought the Democrat won, as against 35% for Trump. So this debate response looks like those in years when Trump won the electoral vote by 77,736 popular votes in three states in 2016 and lost it by 42,918 popular votes in three states in 2020.

Pre-debate polling showed Harris ahead 48% to 47% in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls and 49% to 47% in Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin. Silver was projecting her with a 50% to 49% popular vote edge in November but gave Trump a 61% chance of an Electoral College majority.

But any projections are contingent on events. Nate Cohn, proprietor of the highly rated New York Times/Siena College poll, which showed a pre-debate Trump lead of 48% to 47%, noted that 28% said "they needed to learn more" about Harris, as compared to only 9% about Trump. "More than anything, voters say they want to hear more about where she stands on the issues," Cohn wrote. "And a majority of voters say she's a 'risky' choice and 'more of the same' -- hardly an enviable combination."

Did she resolve those qualms in her favor in the debate? Not in my view, but I'll give the final word to Silver. "Harris got the debate she wanted. If she isn't able to move the needle in the polls at least a little bit, maybe that means the country just isn't buying what she's selling."

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.