By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
An hour into Tuesday night’s presidential debate, our
friend David French could no longer contain himself. “It’s like she’s debating
MAGA Twitter come to life,” he (digitally) exclaimed.
“Victor Orban, dead pets, Ashli Babbitt, ‘J6.’ She’s debating Catturd.”
I thought that was uncharitable. “Catturd,”
the most bizarrely named right-wing influencer, would have had better message
discipline.
Judgments of who won and who lost a debate are
subjective, except in cases where one participant is clearly suffering
from brain damage. But you can usually get a dependable read on which
candidate had the worse night by whose supporters are whining more in the
aftermath.
By that standard, Tuesday’s event was no contest.
Trumpist media was aflame on Wednesday with complaints
that ABC News’ moderators had challenged their man aggressively while declining
to lay a glove on Kamala Harris. Hugh “Hannity With Glasses” Hewitt predicted that
outraged voters would punish the network for its performance by handing Trump
the presidency. Woollier populists went as far as to call for ABC to have its broadcast license
revoked (and even face
prosecution) for its one-sidedness, a fash-y critique that inevitably
trickled up to
Donald Trump himself.
It’s true that ABC News fact-checked Trump more
diligently than it did Harris. It may or may not be true that the imbalance was justified.
But if your fans are reduced to accusing your opponent of having worn secret
radio transmitters in her earrings, your problem is bigger than media bias.
When your team loses 28-0, it ain’t because of the refs.
Some right-wing commentators, and even a Republican
senator or two, were more candid afterward about Trump’s performance. Lindsey
Graham confessed to The Bulwark’s Tim Miller that the debate had
been a
“disaster.” National Review editorialized on Trump’s
missed opportunity. Brit Hume told the Fox News faithful that their hero
had had “a
bad night” and a voter panel hosted by the network confirmed the
assessment, with 12
of the 17 participants agreeing that Harris had won.
The Democrat came out ahead in post-debate snap polling
too. A CNN
survey found that 63 percent of viewers believed Harris had prevailed.
Almost universally, opinion outside of populist media
lined up behind David French’s real-time diagnosis. Instead of prosecuting the
policy case against Harris, Trump had continually wrapped himself around the
axle of Very
Online MAGA hobby horses—and what’s worse, Harris had plainly
baited him into doing it. Watching her set obvious
traps for him and then seeing him walk right into them had the feel at
times of Bugs Bunny toying with Elmer Fudd.
One minute you’re out hunting wabbits, the next minute
the barrel of your rifle has been tied in a knot while you babble about Haitian
immigrants eating pets.
In hindsight, the fact that Trump arrived in Philadelphia
with super-crank Laura
Loomer in tow
was an omen for how the evening would go. “Trump has put Twitter edgelords
around himself and, like Kamala Harris in 2019, Trump is more interested in
winning the fight on Twitter than the fight for the country,” conservative
radio host Erick
Erickson trenchantly observed afterward. Harris has gotten less radical and
fringe-siloed over the last five years, Trump
more so. It showed.
She won, no doubt. Does it matter at all?
An election about Trump.
Some pundits get anxious when they’re wrong. I get
anxious when I’m right.
I’m the guy who thought Tea Party conservatives would
laugh Trump off the stage during the 2016 primaries, who thought the Access
Hollywood tape would squelch what was left of his chances that year, and
who thought January 6 would end his viability as a political leader for all
time.
In hindsight, this newsletter should have been called
“Not Pessimistic Enough.”
I’m an idiot. A politician is generally better off doing
the opposite of whatever I advise, especially if it involves trusting Americans
to behave sensibly. So imagine my horror on Tuesday night to see Kamala Harris
following my theory of how she can win this election.
Yesterday, I took
issue with Jonah Goldberg’s view of the race. Jonah thinks Harris has erred
by not shifting sooner from her hopey-changey “vibes” campaign to a
policy-focused message aimed at separating her from her very unpopular former
running mate. If she wants to be the “change candidate,” Jonah reasoned, she
needs to define herself on policy as a centrist alternative to Joe Biden. If
she doesn’t, voters (and Donald Trump) will conclude that she’s running for
Biden’s second term. And that’s not a conclusion that will work to her
advantage.
I, on the other hand, think that “vibes” remain her best
chance to win, and that she should keep trying to ride them for as long as she
can. Sure, she’ll need to put a little meat on the policy bone for voters, but
ultimately, she and her party are betting everything on the idea that Americans
won’t reelect Donald Trump if they’re offered a generic Democrat as an
alternative. By dint of his policy record and his advanced age, Joe Biden was
no longer generic. Harris, in her vague-on-policy “vibes” incarnation, is. Sort
of.
And even if she wanted to make a policy-heavy case for
her candidacy, her ability to do so is limited. Her flip-flops toward the
center are too blatantly opportunistic to be convincing, and Trump’s four years
as president give undecided voters a feeling of certainty about how he’ll
govern that no amount of promises she might make can match.
At bottom, Jonah seems to think the election is a
referendum on Harris and that her path to victory requires giving swing voters
reasons to prefer her. I think it’s more of a referendum on Trump and that she
wins by giving voters reasons to oppose him. Jonah’s theory of being a “change
candidate” is to strike a clear contrast on policy with Trump and with
Joe Biden. My theory of being a “change candidate” is to stay as generic as
possible while urging Americans to turn the page on the
miserable political “vibes” of the past decade.
Judging by Tuesday’s performance, she seems to agree with
me. God help us all.
Her strategy throughout the evening was to try to needle
Trump into behaving like the irascible, sloppy, conspiracy-soaked goon who
exhausted voters sent packing in 2020. Repeatedly, wrote Semafor’s Dave
Weigel, Harris “invoked a fact from the Trump years that Democrats felt had
been forgotten by voters since 2020, she said something that would set her
opponent off, and then she used his familiar eruptions in response to urge
voters to take the off-ramp on the Trump era.”
She made the debate about him by keeping
him on defense for most of the night, the New York Times observed,
which is precisely what a “vibes” candidate should want to do. By inviting her
opponent to make a clown of himself repeatedly—and not getting into the weeds
on policy—she offered swing voters no reason to dislike her and, hopefully,
numerous reasons to dislike him.
The wrinkle, as the Times noted, is that in the
process she might have squandered her last chance to define herself before a
big national audience. If Jonah is right that “vibes” aren’t enough, that to
win she’ll need to cut a clear policy contrast with both nominees from
the last presidential election, then … uh oh.
Maybe Trump wasn’t the only candidate who missed an
opportunity last night.
The
Times interviewed several undecided voters after the debate and
found that they weren’t as charmed by Harris’ performance as the commentariat
was. Some sounded downright Goldberg-ian in explaining where they thought she
failed. “She didn’t, kind of, separate herself” from Biden’s agenda, one
complained. Generally speaking, the Times went on to note,
those interviewed “said she did not seem much different from Mr. Biden, and
they wanted change. And most of all, what they wanted to hear—and didn’t—was
the fine print.”
One man who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 before
switching to Trump in 2016 took it all in and found himself leaning toward the
Republican again. Sure, Trump “came off as crazy” during the debate, he
allowed, but that’s how he always is. I say again: God help us all.
The post-debate triumphalism among Democrats on Wednesday
gave me flashbacks to 2016, in fact, and not
for the first time in this campaign. By popular consensus, Hillary Clinton
cleaned Trump’s clock in their three meetings onstage that year. In 24
separate polls, only once did he manage to convince as much as 40 percent of
the public that he had outperformed her.
It didn’t matter on Election Day. More swing-state voters
preferred a freewheeling authoritarian boor promising radical change than a
polished woman offering politics as usual. Gulp.
Reasons for hope.
Still, that feels too Eeyore-ish even for me under the
circumstances. “Not Pessimistic Enough” is sometimes—fine, almost
always—too pessimistic.
Harris obviously helped herself last night, even if
Jonah’s theory of the race is closer to reality than mine is.
For starters, she isn’t Hillary Clinton. At this point in
the 2016 campaign, Clinton was 13
points net negative in favorability. That was better than Trump, but still
just bad enough to end up costing her states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and
Michigan. She was among the most well-known of America’s political known
quantities—and not in a good way.
Harris is different. Her “vibes” campaign has taken her
own favorable rating from 16 points net negative to slightly
net positive in just two months. Voters don’t dislike her the way
they disliked Clinton, and Trump did next to nothing on Tuesday night to change
that. An electorate that’s inclined to like Harris might be more willing to
credit her for a strong debate performance than it was Clinton.
Having said all that, I can’t help noticing that the gap
in net favorability between Trump and Harris is about the same as it was
between him and Clinton in November 2016, when he won the presidency. Not
pessimistic enough.
CNN’s
snap poll also confirmed that Harris did herself some good beyond simply
winning the debate. Her favorability among the sample went from 39-50
beforehand to 45-44 after, rising 18 points among independents specifically.
Four percent of those polled said the event outright changed their minds about
whom to vote for and another 14 percent said it made them reconsider without
changing their minds. (Yet?) “Debate watchers who supported Trump prior to
Tuesday night were more likely than those who supported Harris to say they were
wavering following the debate, 23 percent to 12 percent,” CNN reported. And a lot of people
watched.
Of course, that same poll found Trump still ahead of
Harris by fully 20 points on who would better handle the economy and ahead by
23 points on who would better handle immigration. Not pessimistic enough.
Insofar as being a woman is a special liability in a
presidential race—especially when a strutting alpha male like Trump is the
alternative—Harris may have helped herself there too.
It wasn’t just that she was better prepared than a man
who famously hardly
prepares at all, which was a given. Rather, her strategy of keeping Trump
on the defensive made her seem dominant, which is typically Trump’s shtick and
key to his tough-guy bravado. It started before a word was spoken, Politico
noted, when Harris surprised everyone—including her opponent, it seems—by
striding across the stage to shake his hand. That was a psychological tactic, a
Harris aide confirmed to the publication, a “power move.”
“Trump relishes gaining the upper hand and relentlessly
pressing his advantage, keeping his foes off-kilter and forcing them to fight
on his own terms,” Politico went on to say. Harris turned that around on
him with her Bugs-and-Elmer routine. Viewers inclined to believe that a woman
president would lack the mettle to confront and outwit adversaries were left
with something to think about.
In fact, even the ambivalent undecided voters interviewed
by the
Times “acknowledged that Ms. Harris seemed more presidential than
Mr. Trump.” That’s a big hurdle for an ill-defined candidate to clear,
particularly one who may or may not be carrying gender-related baggage.
There’s one more way in which Harris probably did herself
some good: She may have eased some of the suspicions surrounding her
“basement campaign.”
In my extended family of Fox News watchers, it’s received
wisdom that the vice president is a dope. And in fairness, someone who’s
motivated by partisan politics to believe that about her won’t have trouble
finding snippets from her interviews to feed the perception. She’s been serving
up word
salad for ages. If you were sold on the idea that she can’t articulate
coherent thoughts on policy without a script (which actually is true of one
of the participants last night), the debate promised to expose her
vacuousness on the grandest possible stage.
Her pattern of cringy interview answers also helps
explain why she’s taken so much heat for dodging the press since replacing Joe
Biden as her party’s nominee. It’s not just, or even primarily, a matter of her
refusing to explain her policies or face hard questions about her record. It’s
an echo of the doubts about fitness that ultimately drove Biden from the race:
What if Harris simply isn’t up to the job, she and her campaign know it, and
they’re trying to conceal it from American voters by hiding her from reporters?
One 90-minute debate won’t inoculate her from demands
that she describe her agenda in greater detail and account forthrightly for
some of her failures. But it might be enough to convince some persuadable
voters that she isn’t the unqualified dope they’d heard she was.
Or at least, not the biggest unqualified dope among the
options available.
A good night.
My theory of undecided voters in this race is that most
of them are trying to talk themselves into preferring Trump but haven’t managed
to get past their misgivings yet. There’s no other explanation that makes sense
to me. After eight years of insanity and insurrections, those who are still
open to supporting him have to be looking for reasons to do so. They just …
can’t shake the nagging feeling that it’d be an atrocious idea.
If they can find grounds to disqualify Harris and/or to
reassure themselves that Trump might behave more responsibly in a second term
than he has in his previous 78 years of life, then they’ll pull the trigger.
If I’m right about that, Tuesday’s debate was a roaring
success for Team Bugs. Neither candidate gave undecided voters a reason to rule
Harris out. Both candidates gave them reasons to believe that Trump is Trump,
now and forever, from his muttering
about dog-eating to his admitting that he still has only “concepts
of a plan” for replacing Obamacare despite supposedly having made it a
priority for almost a decade. As the misgivings pile up and the arguments for
doubting Harris diminish, maybe those undecideds will decide that they can’t
rationalize a Trump vote after all.
I still think it’s more likely than not that we end up
with President Fudd next year—not pessimistic enough—but we’re further
away from that today than we were yesterday. Whew.
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