President Trump Handily Beat Kamala Harris In Their Debate – And The Data Proves It

Contrary to what the pundit class would like you to believe, President Trump’s debate performance against Kamala Harris on Tuesday was one of his best – particularly in terms of the outcome it yielded.  The chosen location city of Philadelphia was more than just ceremonial; Philadelphia is the largest city in the most pivotal battleground state of Pennsylvania, which boasts 19 electoral votes – more than any other of the seven “key” swing states.  Thus, the President went into the night with the task of appealing to undecided and Independent voters, situated particularly in Pennsylvania and adjacent rustbelt battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin. 

If there are a group of three states that will decide the election, it would be these – much as they did in 2016.  And Pennsylvania, the largest of the three, is for various reasons the most important.  Thus, President Trump’s repeated appeals to being the pro-fracking, pro-manufacturing candidate, combined with his strong rhetoric against illegal immigration was the ideal one-two punch to target directly this all-important constituency.

Alas, our do-nothing pundit class – the likes of which include the New York Times’ Editorial Board, cable news networks like CNN and MSNBC (and Fox News, whenever Neil Cavuto hosts a show) – displayed, once more, their woeful ignorance of all things political.  These are the folks who chastised President Trump’s debate performance the most.  Their criticisms, however, expose an ignorance about the issues that most resonate with voters.  Part of this has to do with the fact that these networks are composed of out of touch elites, who run their mouths all day long about all sorts of nonsense, utterly disconnected from the harsh on the ground realities that average Americans face daily.  These harsh realities include the financial burdens of record-setting inflation, high mortgage rates, skyrocketing costs on everything from groceries to car insurance – all downstream of policies brought to you by Democratic lawmakers.

They also include the challenges, enacted by mostly Democratic politicians, that have transformed America into increasingly something that resembles a third world nation.  Migrants, like the Haitians assimilated in Springfield, Ohio, bring barbaric practices to our homeland – practices that no longer just include foreign languages, religious customs, or diseases – but extend to cultural practices, like eating pet animals, that have absolutely no place in any civilized nation.  These are unavoidable problems that objectively make life worse, much worse, for everyday Americans – and are directly traceable to Democratic policies like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s open border, which has brought untold millions of illegals onto these shores, with impunity.

When Donald Trump directly confronted Kamala on the border crisis, she characteristically deflected and avoided the problem altogether.  Thus exemplifies the difference between the pundit class, which tends to attach much more value to their view of a so-called “polished” debate performance, than the real issues affecting regular Americans, which ultimately decide elections.  On the latter, President Trump won hands down – because most voters are intelligent enough to recognize that Kamala Harris is the one now in power, she caused these problems currently wrecking our country, and she has the ability right now to fix them – if she wants to.

That she was not able to articulate a reason, repeatedly, why she failed to deliver policies that would benefit native-born Americans, and strengthen our economy and society overall, is something that voters could easily detect through her canned answers and disingenuous cackles, which reeked of the worst sort of political inauthenticity. 

President Trump won not just on substance, but on style also.  While it’s true that his responses were not the products of rote memorization, they were authentic – and voters crave, more than anything else, authenticity from their political leaders.  Indeed, it was this authenticity that endeared President Trump to the masses in 2016, and it’s what continues to separate President Trump from the pack, making him the most beloved politician in our generation. 

Of course, the talking heads on MSNBC will never understand why President Trump delivered a stellar performance in that debate – because they incorrectly equate “good” with buttoned-up, politically correct, fine-tuned answers, the sort of reflexive response associated with Harris. One that mouths a lot of words despite saying little of anything truly substantive.

President Trump, as not only a skilled communicator but visionary entrepreneur, knows in the end that talk is cheap, actions matter.  In politics, especially, the actions of a political leader are what distinguishes the average leader from the great one.  In that vein, President Trump displayed a great deal of wisdom on that debate stage when he implored Kamala to end the debate right then and there, go off to Congress, and put together a deal to, for example, close the southern border.

That Kamala looked utterly befuddled by the suggestion displayed her ignorance and incompetence.  It was ignorant because no wise leader would brush off a call to action with such callous, almost haughty, indifference.  Wise leaders understand the value and priority of actions over words, and thus do not react to a plea to take action with Kamala’s feline snark and derision.  It also was demonstrative of Kamala’s incompetence: for she clearly does not grasp the principle that presidential debates are largely, to quoth the Bard, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In her head, she thinks simply performing well in front of her handlers at ABC is all that it takes to “become President.” Why does she really seek the job? She doesn’t have convictions, meaning she has little of anything to say in terms of original thoughts. Since she outsources her thinking to others, she is likely seeking higher office because others are telling her to do so. Those others, whomever they may be, is what makes her so dangerous — because she is an empty vessel for subversion.

We live in an age oversaturated by new media and countless podcasts (the overwhelming majority of which say little), by cable news and tweets. Lost in that noise is the genuine skill set required to get things of importance done.  Donald Trump understood this better than anyone when he admonished Washington’s political class in 2016 as being “all talk, no action.”  That principle rings louder today, particularly with a candidate like Kamala Harris, whose track record betrays a woman who knows nothing about getting things done in the real world, constructively and for the greater good of society. Her failures are on display all throughout her public career – from district attorney, to senator, to vice president, and now presidential candidate — where she has always been an empty suit, a mere plaything to be exploited by more powerful actors. That has been her casting call for the last thirty years.

Fortunately, Americans have historically been great bs-detectors.  Their penchant for nonsense-detection has been vindicated in all the reliable post-debate polling.  For example, when undecided voters across the seven crucial battlegrounds this cycle were asked which of the two candidates they would vote for, Donald Trump won handily among the sampled group: the 45th President’s prospects improved by three points overall after his debate performance.

These figures are consistent with RCP polling generally, whereby the President maintains leads in crucial battlegrounds such as Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also maintains a formidable 20%+ advantage in the electoral college forecast, according to the rigorous prediction model of polling guru, Nate Silver.  Other reputable polling corroborates these sentiments and has the President leading in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada, too.

The President’s grip over the electorate remains so strong that even left-leaning Time Magazine was forced to concede in the aftermath of the debate that, “[i]n RealClearPolitics’ national poll of polls, [Kamala’s] still trailing Trump by 1.3 points – within the margin error.”  And that, “[g]oing back 20 years, eventual losers of presidential contests at this point were, on average, down 2.6 points in the RCP average. Harris is only faring a bit better than that.”

So, all told, the data comports with the theory that President Trump won the debate.  And he won in the way that is most important: by appealing directly to his core constituents on the bread-and-butter issues that matter.  This cycle, immigration remains the preeminent issue – much as it did, though to a lesser extent, in 2016.  It is an issue that has ravaged so many American communities, in blue states and red states alike, from coast to coast. It is also one that is proving to be Kamala’s Achilles’ heel, where she has been forced to walk back some of her radical, open-borders views, given just how radical and unpopular her administration’s policies have been.

But whatever she might tone down in terms of rhetoric, she cannot erase the real-world effects of those destructive policies.  For good reasons, Donald Trump is the perennial favorite on virtually every single policy this cycle, and no amount of evasion on Kamala’s part can dislodge her from the perilous record that she shares with Joe Biden, the most unpopular president since the advent of modern presidential polling. 

Legacy media wants President Trump to “stay on script” – which is a code word for not speaking openly and honestly about the issues, the lodestar to his 2016 victory.  But they do not know how to win elections.  Indeed, with each debate, they further reveal their ignorance about politics overall, their alleged specialty.  All they know how to do is talk and talk and talk, utterly delusional to the harsher realities of life in a declining Empire.  The delusions and distractions are being driven by a political class and commentariat who, if it were up to them, would rather talk the world out of meaningful action, even if such action is precisely what is needed to save the country.

Paul Ingrassia is an Attorney; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.