The debate began on her terms. The vice-president of the United States walked across the stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, stretched out her hand and introduced herself: “Kamala Harris.”
It was, incredibly, the first time Harris had ever met Donald Trump, whose election to the White House in 2016 coincided with her election to the Senate. Since then, they have circled each other, Harris carving out a reputation in the Senate for grilling Trump administration officials. Four years later, she helped defeat Trump as Joe Biden’s running mate.
Then, for more than 90 minutes on Tuesday night, Harris put Trump on the defensive, taunting him about the size of his crowds and pressing him over his shifting positions on abortion. It clearly rattled the former president, who took the bait again and again.
“Donald Trump actually has no plan for you, because he is more interested in defending himself than he is in looking out for you,” Harris said, in what amounted to the former prosecutor’s opening argument to the American people.
With the race on a knife’s edge, and Trump’s support relatively stable despite his 34 felony convictions, an assassination attempt and the replacement of his Democratic opponent, Harris could hardly afford a shaky performance, much less a defeat. In the end, she delivered what her fellow Californian, Governor Gavin Newsom, described as a “masterclass”.
“She kept looking in the camera, talking about you, talking about me, talking about the American people, talking about the issues they care about, and he was talking about dogs, and he was talking about crowd sizes and his grievances and his little pity party and his victim mindset,” he said. “It was a terrible night for him, but it was, most importantly, a great night for the American people.”
During the debate, Trump would not commit to vetoing a national abortion ban, arguing the question was meritless because neither party would conceivably win the 60 votes needed to pass such legislation in the Senate. He declined to say he lost the last election, or that he regretted any of his actions on January 6, when he delivered an incendiary speech before his supporters stormed the US Capitol.
Trump attempted to press his strengths, turning nearly every question back to the issue of immigration. “She’s been so bad, it’s ridiculous,” he claimed at one point. But in the spin room following the debate, even his strongest supporters conceded Harris had delivered a decent performance.
“We heard a lot of words better delivered than usual, I will admit, from Kamala Harris,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential hopeful turned Trump surrogate. “But actions speak louder than words.”
Trump certainly landed some punches, and even a few laughs. He claimed Harris had adopted “my philosophy now” on the economy. “I was going to send her a Maga hat,” he quipped, as Harris threw her head back and laughed.
Navigating rounds of testy exchanges, Harris sought to outline her policies while embracing the mantle of change, telling viewers that Trump would rely on “the same old, tired playbook: a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling”.
“Let’s turn the page on this. Let’s not go back,” she said.
Trump in turn sought to cast Harris as a carbon copy of the unpopular president, an attack line his surrogates had previewed before the debate. At one point, Trump accused Harris of ripping off Biden’s economic plan.
“It’s like, four sentences, like: ‘Run, Spot, run,’” he said.
Trump also challenged Harris on abortion, trying to pin her down on whether she would approve legislation that allowed women to end a pregnancy into the third trimester. Deflecting the attack that she was a “Marxist” who supports far-left climate policies, Harris repeated that she would not ban fracking and touted the Biden administration’s energy agenda, prompting some liberal climate activists to decry the event as a “missed opportunity”.
“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the communications director of the Sunrise Movement, a climate advocacy group.
But Trump ended the evening aggrieved by his treatment at the hands of the ABC News hosts, David Muir and Linsey Davis.
“It was obviously three-on-one,” Trump told reporters in a surprise appearance in the spin room after the debate, repeating the claim made by his surrogates that the moderators had treated him unfairly. But he boasted: “I thought this was my best debate.”
In a departure from past presidential debates, the moderators played a more assertive fact-checking role in addition to asking the questions. The interventions infuriated the Republican and his supporters watching. Davis pushed back on his claim that Democrats supported abortions after birth, which is illegal in all 50 states, while Muir refuted the false rumor amplified by Trump onstage that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are abducting and eating pets.
The significance of the debate, almost certainly the candidates’ biggest audience before election day, was underlined by Biden’s disastrous performance in June. But a good performance – or, perhaps more relevant in today’s fractured media environment, a viral moment – does not necessarily spell victory in November.
The national mood remains sour. A strong majority – 61% – of voters say they want the next president to bring a “major change” to the country, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. Only 40% of voter say the vice-president represented “change” compared with 61% who said the former president did.
And in 2016, Hillary Clinton was deemed the winner of all three of her debates against Trump, and he still won. It remains unclear whether there will be another debate between Harris and Trump.
Speaking at Cherry Street Pier, a short distance from the debate site, Harris told a crowd that she and her running mate, Tim Walz, were still the “underdogs” in the race for the White House. But they ended the evening on a high note.
“Tonight highlighted for the American people what’s at stake,” Harris said. “Hard work is good work and we will win.”
As she finished her remarks, The Man by Taylor Swift blared at the venue just moments after the pop star, one of the music industry’s most celebrated stars, announced her endorsement of the vice-president.
“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
