Harris v. Trump: Who Won, and How?

Last night's presidential debate went essentially as all parties intended.

Quoth the Raven pushes back against the consensus narrative that Kamala Harris won last night’s debate. I think that QTR is right to look at the debate in the context of the contest as a whole.

I believe that the debaters both achieved what they intended. (As did the moderators, who clearly had an agenda.) I think that the two candidates’ strategies, however, were competely opposite in their potential effectiveness.

One strategy was likely to work, and the other was entirely misdirected.

Here’s what happened in the debate, from the perspective of the two candidates’ goals.

Harris’s objective was to depict Trump as not fit to be president, by attacking his character. People should not vote for Trump, Harris argued, because he is a mean man who wants pregnant women to bleed to death in their cars. Trump is a typical privileged white male who did not earn his riches and will resist efforts to level the playing field for those less fortunate than he, Harris asserted.

Trump’s objective was to tie Harris to the disastrous policies of the Biden administration and hang them around her neck. These include inflation, the border disaster and immigration train wreck, White House incompetence and lies, weak economic growth, opposition to fracking, high taxes, excessive federal spending, international chaos, abortion radicalism, etc. Harris was there when the Biden administration was destroying the economy, making life much worse for the great majority of Americans, and unleashing wars around the world through U.S. weakness, wars that could turn nuclear, Trump argued. Harris was complicit in the disastrous Biden administration and intends to double down on those policies and implement even worse ones, regardless of what she is now saying, Trump asserted.

Harris achieved her objective. Orange Man Bad.

Trump achieved his objective. Harris equals Biden plus even worse radicalism.

Harris’s successful characterization of Trump will not move the needle for many people (if any), however, because everybody already knows Trump exceedingly well and nearly all have formed their opinions of him. Harris was the one on a trial run last night.

Trump’s characterization of Harris as four more years of incompetence and irrationality was possibly news to some undecided voters and could sway their opinions.

Trump’s debate strategy was rightly calculated to cause swing voters to think very seriously about whether they want four worse years than the nation has already endured.

A far better strategy for Harris would have been to do what she has tentatively tried to accomplish on occasion thus far: distance herself from Biden.

Harris could have used the debate to characterize herself as a fiscal conservative who is strongly antiwar. She could say that she was always in favor of fracking personally but had to wait until her party caught up with her, and she can now be public about it. Harris could have claimed that Biden kept her from closing the border, and as president she will crack down on illegal immigration and limit legal immigration until and unless the recent immigrants are assimilated and established as cultural Americans. Harris could have acknowledged her support for a national law restoring the Roe v. Wade regime but taken the Bill Clinton approach of seeming very sorry that abortions happen.

In short, Harris could have lied about her intentions, to reach out toward the political center. Her supporters would surely have stuck with her, on the premise that she is just doing what it takes to win power and will be back to her old self on Nov. 6.

Swing voters would probably retain suspicions about Harris but would like hearing her centrist comments. Some might move into her column. Trump would complain about the flipflops and obvious bait-and-switch strategy, but Trump is always complaining about something, Harris’s supporters would argue.

That strategy would have taken advantage of the voters’ relative lack of knowledge of Harris’s political positions and history and the media’s willingness to run interference for her. Instead, Harris and her team (and the moderators) pursued a strategy that will only reinforce Trump’s characterization of her by heightening the contrast between the two.

Both candidates achieved their goals last night. Only one team’s approach had a good chance of giving swing voters something new to think about.