Now that was an interesting debate.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump clashed for two hours Tuesday night in a presidential debate that, incredibly, might have as much impact as the first presidential debate of this election cycle. And that’s saying something considering the first debate pretty much ended President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.
Did Tuesday night end anyone’s candidacy? No. But it was not a good night for the former president.
With the exception of Trump’s diehard supporters, most seemed to agree that Harris dominated this showdown.
Afterward, CNN’s Chris Wallace told Jake Tapper, who moderated that first Biden-Trump debate, “Jake, I didn't think I was ever going to witness a debate as devastating as the one that you and Dana (Bash) moderated back in June, where Joe Biden basically tanked his reelection campaign. I think tonight was just as devastating, (but for Trump).”
CNN’s Van Jones said, “She whooped him. She just whooped him. … She baited him then she spanked him.”
Tapper said of Harris luring Trump into losing his cool, “If you're a fisherman, as I struggle to be, you would be lucky to have your bait taken so often.”
Even on Fox News, Brit Hume said, “Make no mistake about it, Trump had a bad night.”
Who had a good night? Well, clearly Harris supporters (and even others) will say Harris. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called it a “lopsided” victory for Harris.
Hard to argue with that.
But I’m talking about the third party on the stage: ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, who had a mostly good night.
Mostly? Let me explain.
There was a whole lot of good. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good.
Let’s start with the questions: tough and fair of both candidates, including lengthy sections on the economy, immigration, reproductive rights, the wars overseas, health care and the climate.
But where the moderators shined was in doing something that Tapper and Bash, purposefully, did not do in the first debate: a little fact-checking in real time. On at least four occasions, Muir and Davis fact-checked an untrue statement. It just so happened that all of them were in response to something Trump said.
The moderators called out Trump, while talking about abortion, for saying babies were being murdered after they were born. They corrected Trump on crime statistics. And they fact-checked him when he repeated lies about the 2020 election.
And, in what surely was the most bizarre moment of the night, Trump repeated a crazy conspiracy that has cropped up in recent days that accuses Haitian immigrants of killing people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Trump said, “In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Muir quickly said there was no evidence of such things. (And, I can’t believe this needs to be reported, but Jessica Orozco of the Springfield News-Sun wrote, “The Springfield Police Division said Monday they have received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten.”)
Now, to be clear, the moderators didn’t spend the entire night fact-checking Trump, even though they could have. CNN’s Daniel Dale said on air that in his first view of the debate, Trump told at least 33 lies, while Harris said one in addition to a few misleading and/or needed-context statements. So it’s hard to praise the moderators too much for calling out just a handful, but that was better than none.
The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta tweeted, “One way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times and Harris zero times. Another way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times instead of 500 times.”
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik tweeted, “The ABC duo is fact checking, pretty much just Trump so far, but it's focused, crisp and brief, so it doesn't feel as though it's interfering.”
The New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum wrote, “It is striking how Muir and Davis, in calm and authoritative tones, have constructed factual guardrails around several of Trump’s baseless claims. Trump rarely sits for interviews with mainstream news anchors outside the partisan environs of cable news. The ABC anchors are providing a model here for real-time fact-checking of the candidates that we have not glimpsed in previous debates.”
(For more fact-checking, here is PolitiFact’s roundup of the debate.)
The moderators fact-checking Trump at all seemed to irritate some Trump supporters. On CNN, political commentator David Urban complained about them.
The New York Times’ Reid J. Epstein wrote, “In the spin room, Trump surrogates are complaining about the moderators. ‘It was a poor performance by the moderators,’ said Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for the Republican nomination himself in the primaries. He called the event ‘a three-on-one debate.’”
Trump spokesman Brian Hughes told reporters after the debate, “You had moderators live rebutting as if they’re on the team together.”
But CNN contributor and GOP strategist Scott Jennings said, “It is a little hard to complain about the refs when you’re not making your own jump shots.”
If there was one complaint about the ABC moderators it was that they seemed to allow Trump chances for rebuttal when they weren’t supposed to. Several times, Trump bullied his way past the moderators who said they wanted to move on to the next topic. ABC said microphones would be muted when it wasn’t a candidate’s turn to talk, but Trump was allowed to speak and his microphone went from being off to being turned on.
As a result, MSNBC reported that Trump spoke for 43 minutes and 3 seconds, while Harris spoke for 37 minutes, 41 seconds. That more-than-five-minute difference was because Trump was allowed to talk when he wasn’t supposed to.
But, in the end, it’s hard to say that anything the moderators did tipped the balance of fairness. Aside from a few lapses allowing Trump to speak out of turn, they kept the debate moving, hit pertinent topics, and the result was that viewers got an accurate sense of where the candidates stand at this moment.
Media analyst Oliver Darcy wrote, “ABC News showed how it is done.”
