Some Rough Thoughts on the Debate

Reports of Harris's victory are greatly exaggerated.

The chattering class consensus is that Kamala Harris won the presidential debate, by a lot. She came off as the more mature candidate by far, and she provoked Trump into saying things that it was very predictable Trump was going to say, like Haitian immigrants are eating people’s cats and dogs, illegal immigrants are getting bottom surgery in prison, and (my personal favorite) Harris is going to destroy Israel within two years if she’s elected. That Harris “won,” insofar as that means she performed better, is obvious to anyone who isn’t blinded by partisanship—a CNN flash poll showed Harris winning 63-37, almost as much as Trump beat Biden (67-33).

But it’s not very interesting for pundits simply to note the fact that Harris can speak in full sentences and Trump is a petty, vindictive moron, and then call it “expert analysis.” We already know that. And it’s not so much “analysis” as it is observation.

A much more interesting and important question, which the pundit class has so far been sidestepping, is how much anything from last night is going to matter by November. It’s easy to revel in victory or wallow in cope, but it’s difficult to make clear, measurable predictions that you can be held accountable for. That’s why there are so many think pieces going up right now that end with something like, “The real question is whether this is going to change any voters’ minds, and we’ll see how that plays out two months from now.” If that’s the real question, though, then why aren’t you trying to answer it?

As it happens, we had a few ways before the debate to know what Harris needed to do to win over undecided voters. Political scientists David Broockman and Josh Kalla, some of the leading experts on political messaging, wrote about a month ago:

[S]ocial science research (including some of our own) suggests that Democrats should not be focused on attacking Trump. A huge new survey we fielded — testing dozens of messages among over 100,000 people — finds the same. Voters have been hearing about Donald Trump for almost ten years now. If they’re willing to vote for him based on that near-decade of experience, a few ads or a new quip are unlikely to change their minds about him. In our survey, we found that every attempt at attacking Trump — from overturning Roe to his threat to democracy and calling him “weird” — didn’t persuade voters to support Harris.

Instead of attacking Trump, Democrats should talk about Harris. The bad news for Democrats is that, to the extent voters do know Harris, they think she is very liberal and that her policies would not make them better off financially. The good news is that voters have heard much less about Harris than Trump: in fact, many don’t know basic facts about whether she supports protecting Social Security or taxing the rich. That means there should be much more room to change voters’ views about her. Our survey finds exactly this: Only messages praising Harris’s achievements and describing her vision for America win her votes. Messages attacking Trump don’t.

A New York Times/Siena College poll days before the debate supported Broockman and Kalla’s findings: 28 percent of likely voters said they need to know more about Harris, compared to 9 percent who need to know more about Trump. Most people already know that Trump says racist things about immigrants and goes on bizarre rants at his rallies. But a lot of people who don’t like Trump are still wary about Harris, and they’re not going to vote for her until she gives them some good reasons to vote for her that don’t involve her opponent.

That’s precisely what Harris failed to give them last night. In her opening statement, she gave a pat phrase about building an “opportunity economy” and then attacked Trump’s tariffs. On abortion, she briefly said she’d codify Roe (something that’s not going to happen) and then pivoted to red state abortion restrictions. On immigration, she attacked Trump for sabotaging the border bill. On Afghanistan, she attacked the Trump-Taliban deal. On health care, she made an awkward pivot from half-disavowing her past support for single payer to attacking Trump for trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. On climate, she touted the Inflation Reduction Act and then spent at least as much time attacking Trump for calling climate change a hoax. If you were a low-information voter, you came out of the debate with barely any more idea of what Kamala Harris stands for than when you went in.

For a lot of people, the headline message from last night is that Harris baited Trump into saying crazy things because his brain has been melted by decades of Fox News watching and he lacks self-control. I think that’s true, but I also think that Harris could have made a better case for herself if she focused more on her record and vision for the country. She didn’t do that, either because she doesn’t have a good record and vision to run on, or because she wants to remind her supporters of how much they hate Trump. Either way, her “victory” (whatever that means) will probably keep up energy and raise more money from committed liberals, but it won’t make much difference for people whose votes are still gettable.

I’m not totally confident in my reasoning here, but I’d give myself a fair shot of being correct. If the polls show a noticeable uptick for Harris in the next two weeks—say, at least 1.5%—then you’ll know I’m wrong. (Right now, Nate Silver’s national average has the race at Harris +2.2. I predict that on September 25, it will be no more than Harris +3.7.)

If I’m right, you may have to wonder why my concerns haven’t come up yet in the post-debate analysis by the commentariat. You can say it’s all part of a conspiracy to cover up Harris’s flaws, but if the media really do want her to win, then you’d think they would do everything in their power to get her campaign to follow the best strategy. You could say that most people just don’t care about political science, but you should expect the people who do politics for a living—and offer good enough analysis that they rise to the top of their field—to be the ones who take political science theories and data the most seriously when they’re appropriately applied.

That’s what you should wonder if I’m right. And if I’m wrong, just ignore me.