Trump can’t afford another disaster, but the first may make little difference

Of course, he won’t debate her a second time.

For the benefit of his followers and his ego, Donald J. Trump declared that he bested Kamala Harris in a debate that even conservatives – smart ones anyway – declared was a hands-down disaster for him.

“Kamala Harris baited Trump with surgical precision, triggering his insecurities — about his crowd sizes, his wealth, his racism, his criminal record — while giving him full scope to wallow in his delusions. In the 90-minute debate, she exposed Donald Trump and broke him,” Charlie Sykes wrote on Substack. “Trump was undisciplined, unprepared, and easily goaded into his signature tantrums of grievance, which were as incoherent as they were divorced from reality … Tens of millions of voters watched a live reality television show in which a bitter, confused, and diminished old man was falling apart in front of their eyes.”

Another conservative, David Frum, weighed in in The Atlantic: “He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backwards-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible. Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch.”

Certainly, much of the public appeared to agree that Vice-President Harris mopped the floor with Trump. Shortly after the Sept. 10 fracas, a CNN poll showed Harris winning 63% to 37% among debate-watchers and a YouGov poll showed her winning 54% to 31% among registered voters who watched at least some of the melee, with 14% unsure, according to The Washington Post. 

So, with his animalistic smarts, Trump is wise to avoid a second debate. How could he possibly want a second round of his angry squinting, venting and waxing irrational and conspiratorial? By contrast, when he controls the stage and speaks to true believers in his rallies, he’s the master of his own domain (reference intentional), the TV-savvy demagogue who can appear slick and poised (despite many slips).

For Harris backers, however, the problem is that the debate may not have moved the needle much with the few undecided folks out there. The latest polls barely budged, with Harris ahead of Trump by just 2.8 points, at 47.1% to Trump’s 44.3%.

Despite Harris’s national lead, the model that polls expert Nate Silver uses still gives Trump a higher chance of winning the necessary 270 Electoral College votes in November, as Newsweek reported. It shows Trump taking the critical battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina. The other swing states, Wisconsin and Michigan, are a toss-up.

How can this be? How can such an inarticulate boor, a proven criminal and business and political failure, still have the slightest bit of credibility? After his disastrous performance, how can his party still rally around him, unlike the Democrats and President Biden?

The answer is complicated. But I suggest it starts, paradoxically, with the fact that Harris won the debate. In her triumph, she is many things that Trump’s followers can’t abide: smart, young, female and Black.

On the smart point, Trump has long been popular with undereducated voters. In 2016, only 29% of Trump voters had college degrees, compared with 43% of Hillary Clinton’s voters. And while non-college whites made up a majority of Trump’s voters (63%), they constituted only about a quarter of Clinton’s (26%). As Trump famously said after winning a Nevada primary in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.”

Did many of them even watch the debate? Some 67.1 million Americans tuned in, more than the 53.1 million who watched Biden self-destruct in the June 27 faceoff with Trump, but less than the 73 million who watched the first Trump-Biden match in 2020 and far less than the 84 million who watched Clinton and Trump battle the first time in 2016.

And let’s remember that Clinton was widely pronounced the winner in her three debates with Trump back then. Only some 32% of those polled pronounced him the winner in his best performance in the second debate. Just 24% judged him favorably in his first outing with Clinton.

With both Clinton and Harris, I submit, the fact that both women ran circles around Trump intellectually was a negative with much of the undereducated electorate. Recall that such folks likely spent much of their time in school resenting the smart kids, so they likely would give Clinton and Harris little credit for their debating savvy.

Second, Harris at 59 is relatively young, especially compared with the 78-year-old Trump. Middle-aged voters tend to support Trump, while those over 65 are split evenly, and are up for grabs. Thus, we see Harris pounding away on the Biden Administration’s efforts to cut insulin costs, its moves to let Medicare negotiate with drugmakers and its $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket drug costs. We also see Trump’s plan to exempt Social Security payments from income taxes.

A lot of the older folks turned away from President Biden after his debate debacle. Will the Trumpers among them do so now after the former president’s poor performance? Will they see the signs of cognitive decline that have long been evident to mental health professionals?

“If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” Weill Cornell Medical College professor and psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic. “A condition such as vascular dementia or Alzheimer’s disease would not be out of the ordinary for a 78-year-old.” 

Still, let’s not forget the potent impact of identity politics. For all her brilliance, her achievements and her skills, Harris is female and Black, guaranteeing an uphill fight. According to the latest Pew Research Center polling, most Harris supporters say Trump’s race will help him (59%), as will his being male (56%). Most Trump supporters, by contrast, say the former president’s race and gender will not make much of difference (66% say this about Trump’s race, 61% say the same of his gender), but the latter numbers are hardly encouraging in a tight race.

Another element in Trump’s favor is the weariness many voters feel about the race, a sentiment the non-stop headline-grabbing nonsense and divisiveness from Trump has fueled. Some Trump supporters in my family, for instance, are just tired of it all and want the election behind them. They don’t want to hear criticisms of their golden boy, no matter how valid. As Harris has noted, even Trump rally-goers drift out of his gatherings early out of exhaustion and boredom.

Finally, there’s the matter of faulty memories. Despite such evidence as the Covid-induced rise in unemployment to 14.8% in 2020 and the 6.4% rate Trump left to Biden, Trump claims his tenure produced the greatest economy in the history of the world. That is simply false, and yet his repetition of the claim appears to have lulled Trumpers into believing it.

“In the U.S., average annual GDP growth during the past eight years has been almost constant in real terms, except for the Covid period (2020 and 2021): 2.6% in 2017-2019 and 2.3% since 2022,” economist Enrico Colombatto wrote in August.

When Biden took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4%, Colombatto added. The rate gradually declined to the low of 3.4% in early 2023 before climbing to 4.2% under an inflation-fighting economic slowdown engineered by the high interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

Let’s recall, moreover, that presidents can influence economies but they don’t control them. The Fed has far more to do with inflation – admittedly very high under Biden – than a president does. And lately it appears that the Fed will move to lower interest rates.

Back in 2016, Trump’s demagoguery and stagey anger proved remarkably effective. But is the sequel playing badly now? It’s possible that Harris’s efforts to paint an optimistic future, with programs to help housing get on track and tax credits for parents of young children – “the opportunity economy,” as she calls it – will sell better than Trump’s rage. So, too, may her plans for reviving a border-fixing bill that Trump quashed early this year so he could run on that troubling issue.

Nonetheless, given all the possible pitfalls in coming weeks and the shortcomings of polling, it would seem the election remains either candidate’s to win. It may prove to be a matter of voter turnout, which could rest on which candidate can generate more enthusiasm. It may be a matter of knocking on doors, the key for Barack Obama’s victories. So far, Trump’s “ground game” seems weak, as he relies on rallies and headlines.

Certainly, Democrats have been winning the dynamism race ever since Biden yielded to Harris. Can Harris sustain that? Can she convince voters that the exhausting politics of division and the chaos that Trump tends to sow are better left behind rather than repeated for another four years? The questions remain open.