I tend to not be good at gauging who won a presidential debate after I've seen it. Being an unswayable progressive, I allow my own bias to think that my side has always won. I even thought that Barack Obama did alright in his first debate with Mitt Romney back in 2012, a debate that even Obama himself later admitted that he lost.
Given that, I watched the first (and probably only) presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris with anxiety. I knew that the bump in the polls that Harris received after President Joe Biden agreed to step down and she took over as the nominee had seemed to fade, with the race now being a tossup.
Even right after the debate, I wanted to say that Harris won, but I wasn't sure. My biggest fear was that the lies that Trump spoke, most of which he had repeated many times at his rallies, just might work on the American public at large the same way that they do for his rally crowds. (And, for the record, a CNN fact checker says that he lied 33 times, and Harris only did once, and some of his more absurd lies were corrected live by the moderators).
I was relieved to hear that nearly all of the pundits have said that Harris won; she looked calm, collected and often even amused while Trump got angrier and angrier. Plus she introduced some economic ideas that could be popular and firmly stated her position on abortion well.
Plus she really did seem to get under Trump's skin better than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden did in their debates with him. Perhaps the most interesting exchange came when Harris said “I’m going to actually do something really unusual. I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies. Because it’s a really interesting thing to watch.” She then mentioned his usual rally speech subjects like windmills causing cancer and the fictional character Hannibal Lecter. Then she concluded by saying, "And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
Not surprisingly, to a man obsessed with his rallies and their size, Trump looked flustered and threw out an absurd childish insult when it was his turn to speak, “People don’t go to her rallies, there’s no reason to go, and the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there.” Hopefully, most of the American public will see just what happened there, a bitter old man lashed out over an insult to the thing that he was most obsessed with; his own popularity. For the rest of the debate he seemed flustered, ranting laughably about immigrants eating people's dogs while Harris just rolled her eyes at his ridiculous claims.
One clear indication that Trump lost is that shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, fell more than 12 percent the next day. He also looked like a loser when he started bleating that the debate was "rigged" against him; as usual, he thinks that everything he ever does is perfect and the only way he can ever lose is if the other side cheats.
But even if Harris did as good as possibly could be expected last night, I still fear it may not be enough to get her over the finish line. Don't forget that Obama in 2012 and George W Bush in 2004 both lost their first debates and then won reelection. Debates tend to only have a slight effect on the polls, and with two months to go, this is still a very close election. Still, it was great to see that at least once, Trump was called on his terrible lies and humiliated in front of millions.
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