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THE POST-DEBATE CHALLENGE FOR HARRIS  
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Ronald Brownstein
September 11, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ Buoyed by her dominant performance, the Democrat will need to
reassure voters on their key economic concerns. _

, Illustration by The Atlantic.

 

The only way that last night’s presidential debate could have gone
better for Vice President Kamala Harris is if it had been held in late
October, not early September. With a forceful, confident, needling
performance, Harris did everything Democrats could have hoped for when
they pressured President Joe Biden to leave the race earlier this
summer. Former President Donald Trump, to a remarkable extent,
marginalized himself, spending much of the evening wallowing in
personal grievances and feverish conspiracy theories of the far right.

A snap poll from CNN showed
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majority of voters thought Harris won the debate. And as Harris did
with her convention speech last month, she likely made substantial
progress last night in convincing open-minded voters that she is
capable of handling the presidency. Trump, meanwhile, displayed all
the tumultuous and divisive behavior that repels even voters
sympathetic to his policy priorities. The debate underscored every
personal contrast that the Harris campaign wanted to establish:
controlled versus chaotic, young versus old, temperate versus angry,
normal versus strange.

“I was expecting Trump to try to rattle Kamala Harris, and I
didn’t expect Kamala Harris would rattle Trump as much,” Aimee
Allison, the founder of She the People, a group that works to elect
liberal women of color, told me. “He seemed very off-kilter. I’m
sure his debate handlers and prep people didn’t tell him to talk
about eating cats and dogs, and talk about rally size. She lived
rent-free in his head.”

So much time—nearly two months—remains before Election Day,
however, that Harris’s strong display last night is unlikely to be
the last twist in this campaign. The momentum from the debate will
ease concerns among Democrats about a series of recent polls showing
Trump cutting into the lead that Harris had established immediately
after the Democratic National Convention. And her performance will
energize Democrats as early voting begins this month
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But the underlying gravity of the race pulls toward a close and
grueling election. Partly, that’s because the nation remains evenly
divided between the two parties, but it’s also because most
Americans remain dissatisfied with Biden’s presidency. Discontented
with inflation, they are inclined to vote for change. Except in his
closing statement, a distracted and querulous Trump largely failed
last night to make the case against the economic record of the
administration in which Harris serves. Yet that case remains available
for him to make in the eight weeks ahead.

As for Harris, despite her other accomplishments last night, she
probably made the least progress in explaining to voters why they
should trust her, not Trump, on the economy. Before Democrats can
truly exhale, Harris in turn must still convince more voters that she
can produce better results than they believe they’ve seen over the
past four years.

As I’ve written
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one of the most ominous trends for Democrats has been that voters’
retrospective assessment of Trump’s performance as president has
been improving, to the point where it exceeds the highest job-approval
rating he received during his time in office. Political strategists
believe that’s largely because voters have been looking back at
Trump’s tenure through the lens of what they like least about
Biden’s: the high cost of living and the pressure on the southern
border.

Last night, though, Harris was able to remind voters that the Trump
presidency involved more—and worse things—than just lower prices
for gas and groceries. In this, she received an assist from him over
and over again: All of the aspects of Trump’s personal conduct that
suppressed the support he enjoyed in office, despite broad
satisfaction with the economy, were vividly evident during the debate.
He was angry, contemptuous, dismissive, and fixated on right-wing
preoccupations: defending the January 6 rioters, repeating false
claims that immigrants are eating pets, taking credit for overturning
the constitutional right to abortion, again insisting that he won the
2020 election. For much of the evening, he looked and sounded like a
man who spent so much time cosseted in the bubble of conservative
media and his own rallies that he had lost sight of how to communicate
with the broader audience that decides presidential elections.

Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, told me he thought that
Trump “didn’t lose any votes” last night because his supporters
are so irrevocably bonded to him. But he believed that Trump’s
faltering performance had dangerously lowered his ceiling of potential
support. “He came across as a bitter, angry old man,” Ayres said.
“And that limits his ability to expand beyond the 46–47 percent
he’s received in the past.”

By contrast, Harris delivered the same kind of assured, even steely
performance that she did in her acceptance speech at the Democratic
convention. Her answers on defending abortion rights and recounting
Trump’s history of race-baiting and racial discrimination were among
the most powerful responses I have seen in four decades of covering
presidential debates. Democrats thought her measured toughness in
confronting Trump—without the agitation that Biden tended to
display
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his encounters with the former president—may have sent a reassuring
signal about her ability to stand up to other world leaders, such as
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

“She emerged as a very strong leader, and Trump seemed irredeemably
negative and dour, and not someone you’d want to handle power
again,” Stanley Greenberg, a longtime Democratic pollster, told me.
“She was very strong on defense, [and talking about] the military
leaders who support her and not him.” Like other Democratic
strategists I spoke with, Greenberg thought the debate inverted the
most damaging contrast from the Trump-Biden debate, which was
dominated by the image of Biden as frail and scattered. “It was
strong leader/weak leader,” Greenberg said of the image conveyed by
last night’s encounter—with Trump on the wrong side of that
comparison.

Ayres agreed. “Her preparation, her strategy, her expressions all
worked very well to help fill in the blanks that millions of Americans
have about her,” he said.

Beyond creating the personal contrasts that the Harris campaign
sought, the debate also followed her preferred direction on another
important front. Given voter disaffection with the past four years’
economic outcomes—as many as 60 percent of Americans in some polls
have said that they are not better off because of Biden’s
policies—the campaigns are wrestling over whether voters will mostly
look forward or back in making their choice.

Trump’s clear preference is that they look back. He wants the
election to be a referendum on whether voters believe they were doing
better economically under his presidency or Biden’s. Harris is just
as determined that they look forward, and ask who will fight for them
and deliver better results over the next four years.

From the debate’s very first question
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when the ABC News moderators asked whether Americans are better off
than they were four years ago, Harris steered the conversation toward
the future. Although nervous in that initial response, Harris focused
not on defending the Biden administration’s record of the past four
years but on emphasizing her agenda to help voters over the next four;
she also accurately highlighted the conclusion of numerous economic
studies
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compared with the Democrats’ plans, Trump’s economic agenda poses
a greater risk
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reigniting inflation, slowing economic growth, and swelling the
federal budget deficit. (Harris twisted the knife on the last
point by citing a forecast
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University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Trump’s alma mater.)
On immigration and border security, Harris’s other great
vulnerability, she briskly pivoted from a question about the Biden
years to detailing how Trump had helped sink
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bipartisan bill—which she supported and has pledged to sign
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given the opportunity as president—to beef up border enforcement.

Trump was so distracted by Harris’s jabs, and his own tendency to
revert to a playlist of conservative obsessions, that he did not
consistently challenge her efforts to shift voters’ attention toward
the future. Only when Trump finally slowed down for his closing
statement did he return to an argument that could yet prove compelling
for some voters: “Why hasn’t she done it” already? he asked, of
the many plans that Harris had touted over the previous 90 minutes.

That talking point, if sustained, might ultimately prove more
threatening to Harris than almost anything else Trump said last night.
Alternatively, the erratic behavior he displayed through the rest of
the debate might sink his chances. Such a small number of voters, in
so few swing states, will decide the outcome of this election that no
one can predict with any confidence what will move them in a little
less than two months from now. Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a senior vice
president at Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates
and organizations focused on mobilizing minority voters, told me after
the debate that Harris’s performance will likely reinforce her gains
with women. But, Fernandez Ancona added, “our biggest challenge in
the next period is to persuade men, particularly men of color” who
have proved receptive to Trump’s contention that he’s more capable
of managing the economy. “Some of those arguments he was making that
fall flat overall _are_ working with men,” she said.

On the fundamental hope of all the Democrats who worked to push Biden
from the race, Harris delivered: She prosecuted the Democratic case
against Trump in a manner that the current president no longer could.
But Trump may not always be as ineffective as he was last night in
making the Republican case against _her_. Harris has regained the
initiative in the race, but she still has to hold it—for what may
seem to Democrats like an eternity. Already, an age seems to have
passed since Biden dropped out of the race, but the time left until
Election Day is slightly longer.

_Ronald Brownstein
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editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN._

* 2024 Elections
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* presidential debate
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* Kamala Harris
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* political strategy
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