Last night was the Harris-Trump debate, moderated by ABC News with no audience and with the candidates’ microphones generally muted when it wasn’t their turn to speak, conditions that had been negotiated by the Biden and Trump campaigns back in May.
The general consensus, at least outside MAGA world, is that Harris demolished Trump. Headlines today from relatively nonpartisan media outlets include “How Harris Roped a Dope” (David Frum for The Atlantic), “Kamala Harris Broke Donald Trump” (Peter Wehner for The Atlantic, including the line “I’ve never seen a candidate execute a debate strategy as well as Harris did”), “The Narcissist Lost the Debate” (Will Saletan for The Bulwark), “The Beginning of the End for Trump” (Bill Kristol for The Bulwark), “It Was Donald Trump’s Night–In the Worst Possible Way” (Jeff Greenfield for Politico), and “Harris Won the Debate–And It Wasn’t Close” (unbylined in Politico). At a minimum, this debate was as good for Harris as June’s debate was bad for Biden. Naturally Trump claims that he won (bigly, one presumes).
To their credit (but to the consternation of many right-wing pundits), the ABC moderators actually did some real-time fact-checking of Trump on a handful of occasions; not that Trump acknowledged his errors. The Washington Post fact-check of the debate is very lengthy, and predominantly indicts Trump rather than Harris. Many of the lies he told last night are golden oldies in the Trump lexicon, but among the newer and also most ludicrous things Trump said last night was to repeat a completely unfounded right-wing rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio have been eating neighborhood cats and dogs. Trump also accused Walz, without any support, of advocating ninth-month abortions and “execution after birth”. Gerald Ford must be turning in his grave about the things Trump gets away with saying at a debate.
What a difference two months has made, and it remains difficult to imagine how these two months could have gone any better for the Democrats: a selfless decision by Biden to fall on his sword; a painless transition to Harris; a surprise VP pick that appears to have been well-received; a decided uptick in the level of optimism and hope among Democratic supporters; an excellent convention and acceptance speech; very strong fundraising; a successful effort to rebrand an incumbent Vice-President as the change candidate; and now an excellent debate performance against the most experienced Presidential debater of all time. Even so, nobody is under any illusion that the election will be anything but close.
Oh – and maybe ten minutes after the end of the debate, Taylor Swift publicly endorsed Harris, responding to Trump having recently shared AI-generated images ostensibly showing that the pop singer was endorsing Trump. Hundreds of thousands of people have already clicked on Swift’s link to a national voter registration site in the wake of her endorsement.
Yesterday was also the last day of primary elections for this cycle, with three states finally selecting their Congressional candidates. One of yesterday’s Democratic primary victors, Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride, is expected to become the first openly transgender House member this fall, in a seat that is open because the incumbent Democrat is running to replace retiring Democratic Senator Tom Carper.
In other electoral news, this week there were State Supreme Court decisions in both Michigan and North Carolina in regards to RFK Jr.’s effort to remove his name from the ballot, now that he has ended his campaign and endorsed Trump. He will no longer be on the North Carolina ballot, but he will still be on it in Michigan.
Finally, DJT stock was down 17% in early trading today after last night’s debate, but only closed down 10% by day’s end, in the mid-$16s.