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 that a decisive 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 in several states.
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, 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 in 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, 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 that, compared with the Democrats’ plans, Trump’s economic agenda poses a greater risk of reigniting inflation, slowing economic growth, and swelling the federal budget deficit. (Harris twisted the knife on the last point by citing a forecast from the 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 a bipartisan bill—which she supported and has pledged to sign if 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 is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN.
