Did the Debate Bring New Votes?
Terry H. Schwadron
Sept. 11, 2024
If you believed all the hype, it was 90 minutes that might change the world.
With polled allegiances so close across the scattered battleground states and across the country, the idea was that this protected, negotiated, stand-up standoff might somehow be the straw that would break an election gridlock. At minimum, it was a chance for each to leave its already persuaded voters motivated to cast their ballot and work towards victory.
My skepticism was high as to whether there anyone remains who was ready to change a mind and a vote based on some smart aleck scripted aside, or bullying gaze, or, who knows, a public policy pronouncement that sounded new.
Still, this debate was fiercer than most, with answers as usual not always on point, and leaving viewers with serious unease about at least one of the pair It seemed apparent that a poised Kamala Harris was able to needle an angered Donald Trump. When they weren’t talking, both candidates were shrugging and eyerolling and using physical cues to disparage. She looked at him; he looked at the camera. The moderators showed up, too, with fact-checks when Trump reinvented history.
Indeed, the debate I may have preferred was one in which Donald Trump and Kamala Harris asked each other questions, and we could evaluate how they think and whether they have anything more in mind about America’s welfare than their own power.
Instead, of course, we got what we should have expected all along: Trump seeking to thump his way rudely and misogynistically through a vague and often untruthful rewrite of history, still in search of justification for siccing his mob on the Capitol. And Harris, working hard to hold onto a perch of responsive and responsible defense of an American Dream that seems hard for too many to grasp and a time in which half the country wants to winnow individual rights across the board and what they mean by the preservation of democracy.
Still, it did earn Harris a formal endorsement from entertainer Taylor Swift, whose Instagram announcements generated a million likes in hours.
The Substance
For all the chatter about Trump’s sense that we are a nation “in serious decline” and Harris’ sense of joy in working together, the clash of the “most important election in history” succeeded mostly in showing completely different candidates.
Trump indeed was the felon and Harris surely the prosecutor. But change in the minds of substantial numbers of voters may have been beyond either.
Voters tuning in may have wanted to listen in hopes that there was no splat by their already chosen candidate; indeed, there was no Joe Biden freeze-up. They may have tuned in for the clash; there were ample moments of confrontation, and enough opportunity to think that the other candidate was, um, lacking in presidential verve.
Some few may have said they were listening for that extra input of policy that would move them to decide for a candidate; in our political risk-avoidance time, that seemed a long shot.
Still, all those moments were there amid the zingers and answers that needed focus.
There were divergent notes about who and what caused inflation, about whether Trump left an economic and public health mess or had created a wonderful economy “destroyed” by Harris and Joe Biden. There was flip-flopping enough on abortion rights and fracking to satisfy opponents of either candidates. Moderators had to tell Trump that no state allows execution of babies, as he asserted
But the dominant card for Trump was his hyper-critical overstatements about immigration, legal or not, including repeating the new debunked conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Ohio — here legally — are eating Ohioans’ pets. Still, he ducked question of how he would complete deportation of more than 11, 15 or 21 million undocumented residents.
Trump ducked responsibility for the Jan. 5, 2021, mob at the Capitol, for mismanagement of Covid, and insisted anew, without evidence, that the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza would not have happened on his watch. Trump refused to acknowledge even that he had lost the 2020 election.
Harris held her own on policy, on promoting her points and on her own liberal use of zingers. She made clear that Trump does not speak to expressed needs of voters over his own. Trump remained notably focused on the past and offered little promise about the future other than prosecuting political opponents and ending the Russia-Ukraine war even before entering the White House again.
Harris and Trump are so different that it seems absurd that any people say they are “undecided.” They are so different that you could almost forget that one is a woman of color and the other a brutish man born to wealth that he has squandered and rebuilt several times over. One thinks the law is there to guarantee rights for all, the other that the law is something he needs the protection of the presidency to escape.
Let’s vote.
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