America Still Processing a Bad But important Debate

While the second attempt on Donald Trump’s life over the weekend has now consumed the headlines, the country is also still processing the former president’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last Tuesday. One week out from that showdown, it’s worth reflecting on what we learned on the debate stage , particularly in light of yet another shocking event that could influence the outcome of the race.

When Joe Biden’s flailing campaign chose to challenge Donald Trump to two debates directly, rather than going through the now-defunct Commission on Presidential Debates, it set off speculation that 2024 might be the last campaign to feature these spectacles. If what occurred last Tuesday is representative, then the demise of network debates won’t be much of a loss.

A debate whose purpose was to reveal where the candidates stood on issues or what they would do in office failed to do either. Kamala Harris’ policies are just as opaque as they were before. The blame for that rests on the moderators and ABC, who evinced an almost total disinterest in pressing Harris after having called for her to provide interviews for weeks.

The moderators showed more interest in ambushing Trump with out-of-context statements that he or someone else in the Repubican Party had made. Even here they failed. While they were eager to interrupt Trump for so-called “fact checks,” they didn’t try to elicit answers, almost as if the purpose of the so-called questions was merely to get Democratic talking points on the record, not to allow Donald Trump to respond.

What was left was a “debate” in which everyone emerged worse off than they entered.

Contrary to the media narrative, Donald Trump did not “lose.” If anything he emerged better off than either Harris or ABC.

By contrast, Harris went into the debate with swing voters not knowing where she stood or why she was running for president, and left it, according to almost every focus group, with undecided voters having even less idea of where she stood.

ABC came off by far the worst. Bias was expected, but their bias emerged in ways which, when mixed with rank incompetence, ruined the debate, not just for the American people, but their favored candidate, Kamala Harris, as well.

Let us examine each in turn.

The Worst Moderating in History: ABC

No one expected ABC to deliver a non-biased performance. It is not merely that the journalistic profession is a left-wing bubble, or that journalism schools increasingly teach that the purpose of journalism is not to impartially report the truth but rather to advance “social justice.”

Rather, with older conservatives turning to Fox, AMAC, and other news services, while younger Americans of all persuasions have abandoned broadcast news altogether, the audience for big three’s nightly news is increasingly relegated to older, white, retired professionals. If members of this demographic once voted Republican, they have not since 2004, if not 1988. They are not merely Democratic partisans, but partisans for an absolute deference to “expertise,” expertise provided by their peers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, David Muir deeply intoned about stories of “adversity” and “sacrifice,” usually involving wealthy older white professionals forgoing cultural events such as Broadway shows, as a sign of the communal spirit that made “America strong.” Donald Trump should have expected better treatment from CNN, or perhaps even MSNBC, and it is not a coincidence that CNN did a much better job in June. CNN is full of partisans who see Donald Trump as an opponent. ABC portrays him as an un-American threat to be exposed.

This was most evident when it came to the enforcement of the rules. Both CNN and ABC chose biased questions, but CNN ultimately viewed the election as a contest or sports game.

For CNN, that meant that while the questions were biased, the basic rules – microphones remaining muted, candidates having time to answer and respond, no interruptions – were upheld for both candidates. CNN did not intervene to save Biden, who was left to flail for the full two minutes in response to questions.

Ultimately, this was the best a Republican can expect. Republicans cannot expect any moderator acceptable to Democrats to exercise their discretion without bias. If fact checks are allowed, they will be used to damage the Republican, whether it is Mitt Romney or Donald Trump. If interruptions or follow-ups are allowed, they will be permitted or denied based on whether they hurt or harm the Republican. What made the CNN debate work was that all discretion was banned in the rules, and the one thing that can be said for CNN is that they enforced the rules.

The same cannot be said for ABC. Both the Harris campaign and ABC made clear their desire to alter the rules agreed upon by the Trump and Biden campaigns, allowing for written notes, open microphones, and follow-ups. President Trump correctly identified that while all of these ideas were fine in theory, in practice they would be weaponized against him. Therefore, he insisted the rules be kept, something ABC agreed to and then ignored.

The result was a repeat of 2012’s Candy Crowley fiasco, as the moderators debated Donald Trump under the guise of questions and often inaccurate “fact checks.” They did not, as CNN did, ask the candidates the same questions. Despite mics in theory being frozen, they let Harris repeatedly ask Trump talking-points masquerading as questions, while interrupting him to “fact check” every time he attempted to do the same.

The most striking evidence for bias is that Donald Trump spoke for 43 minutes while Kamala Harris spoke for 37. That should not have been possible under the rules, which mandated exactly equal time for each candidate enforced by microphone cutoffs.

Running Out the Clock: Harris Tries to Fade out of the Picture

If Kamala Harris’s campaign truly believed her performance was compelling, they would be loudly complaining that there was so little of it. ABC’s rule bending resulted in her speaking for six minutes less than Donald Trump, and it is the one instance in which a Democrat candidate has a legitimate complaint about moderation.

The Harris campaign is perfectly fine with that, and if anything, they would have been happy to have Trump speak for an hour and Harris for 18 minutes. Harris has run a campaign with two and a half themes. She is not Joe Biden, she is not Donald Trump, and she is not Kamala Harris circa 2019 or even 2021. To the extent the debate let her continue this strategy, it was a success for her. She was not forced to defend her shifts in position, or explain her new ones. On that, she came out ahead on points, albeit with a strong assist from the referees.

If Harris did not hurt herself, she also failed to help herself. The last few weeks have brought increasing evidence that voters feel they do not know enough about her. This was brought up in polls, and flagged by the undecided voters on the network panels.

What should concern the Harris campaign is that even as “undecided voters” on those panels said she performed better than Donald Trump, they also stated they still did not have a better idea of where she stood after the debate than before. Most said they were still undecided. A few said that they were moving toward Trump, despite giving her a technical win.

Harris’s success, therefore, may be empty. If this were a high school debate championship, mission accomplished. It is less clear she did what she needed to do in order to substantially improve her position in a presidential campaign.

Donald Trump: Driving the Narrative

Until the June clash with Joe Biden, Donald Trump never “won” a debate in the eyes of professional analysts or instant polls. Nonetheless, he ended the careers of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in debates he supposedly lost.

For better or worse, Donald Trump’s approach to debates is not to win on technical points, but to use them as an opportunity to frame a message. Professionals may have rated Hillary’s answers on the Trans-Pacific Partnership as technically sound, but Donald Trump got his message across: Clinton stood for the policies of the prior 30 years that had hollowed out American manufacturing, and would defer blindly to the consensus of experts who had proven themselves wrong time and again.

Focusing on the specifics of what precisely is going on in Springfield, Ohio, or where battlelines are in Ukraine misses the point. After the debate, the entire nation is talking about immigration in general, and specifically about the Biden administration’s penchant for dropping tens of thousands of migrants off in Middle America without any sort of support or plan and leaving them to their own devices.

Whether cats or dogs are in fact being eaten, there are 20,000 Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and millions of other migrants spread across hundreds of American communities. People know that. If Democrats manage to prove that the one issue which is exaggerated is the threat to local pets, they are still conceding increased crime, crowded schools, and rising housing costs.

Americans know that continuing the war in Ukraine indefinitely is not a realistic policy, and in trying to highlight Trump’s interest in peace, Harris highlights the Biden-Harris administration’s lack of clear objectives.

Even on abortion, Harris failed to frame it around things that might happen. The political realities in Congress mean that no national abortion ban is on the horizon. As a result, both her own position and the one she accused Trump of holding are irrelevant.

Were there missed opportunities for Trump? Undoubtedly. But perhaps the more important thing to note is that in the days after the debate, everyone is discussing immigration. That is no small thing. Harris is left attacking Trump’s performance and answers, but discussing his issues.

Having failed to get across what her answers to the problems facing the country actually are, the fact that the media declared Harris the victor last week is nowhere near as helpful to her as it might seem.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.