The Debate Reviews Say Trump Lost, Harris Won: How It Happened

From my new report on how the Harris team’s debate strategy played out:

It took only a few minutes for Trump to grow flustered by Harris’s reference to a negative analysis of his economic plans by professors at Penn’s Wharton School, his alma mater. Minutes later, she directly quoted a tweet of his praising Chinese leader Xi Jinping over Beijing’s handling of COVID, and he once again spluttered. Soon after, he mixed up Virginia for West Virginia when he went on a tirade about Democrats and “after birth” abortion. He also praised the “genius and heart and strength” of the six conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade—a historically unpopular move. As Trump refused to make eye contact with Harris and grimaced into his notes, I was reminded of what Celinda Lake, a senior Democratic pollster who works with the Harris campaign, told me a few hours earlier: Research shows that 70 percent of what voters take away from debates is the theater aspect, only 30 percent is the actual policy difference.

Harris’s campaign relished the chance to throw Trump off his game after he won the first debate against Biden by simply letting his opponent expose himself as just too old for the job. This time, the Harris team ran an ad on Fox News and stationed billboards around the city taunting Trump about his smaller crowd sizes, an obsession of his that voters find childish. When Trump accused her of busing in paid crowds to her own events, Harris looked like she almost couldn’t believe he took the bait instead of responding to her claim that he doesn’t care about everyday voters. She laughed as Trump insisted that undocumented migrants were eating family pets in Ohio, a far-right conspiracy that took his focus far from his straightforward attempts to blame her for the migrant surge at the southern border. One top Democratic operative, who’d been basically comatose at that point early in the first debate, started texting me “YES” “YES” “YES” every few moments as Trump preached to the far-right corners of X more than persuadable voters in swing states.

You can read the rest here.

To be clear, these results should be taken with a grain of salt, but:

And this isn’t a poll, but still interesting:

Which begs the question:

As I argue in my review of the debate, Harris “baited Donald Trump into losing his temper, then used the visual contrast between them to establish herself as not only a plausible president but the only plausible president onstage.” Also:

The clearest success Harris registered was in performing the role of president. She repeatedly touted her economic plan, rebutting the charge she lacks ideas, which is intended to present her as a lightweight. She also did this by citing her foreign-policy experience, meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and organizing a NATO response to Russia’s invasion. The importance of these validators might be overlooked, but many Americans have old-fashioned views of presidential qualifications, associating it with masculinity.

Most important, she established herself as presidential by appearing calm and confident, in vivid contrast to the bellowing lunatic on the stage beside her.

You can read the rest here.

From my new take on Trump’s bad night:

Trump has a devoted following of people who believe his revisionist take on reality, who don’t accept the experts or the statistics or logic or the evidence of their own eyes and ears. It’s hard to imagine, however, that many persuadable people watching this debate will find it so easy to accept that Trump is right about everything and everyone else is wrong. To the extent that Trump made his war on reality so sweeping and absolute and furious on the stage in Philadelphia, he lost not just the debate but his grip.

Read the rest here.

From her cat-featuring announcement post on Instagram following the debate, which Swift said she watched:

Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.

I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.

That’s what he claimed in a post-debate Truth Social message (while also attacking Harris and the moderators):

I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!

Minutes after the first presidential debate between Trump and Harris ended, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon issued a statement claiming victory and extending an offer for a second matchup between the two candidates. “Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?” she wrote.

The Washington Post reports that Trump’s team appears game, for now, with campaign adviser Chris LaCivita saying of the request, “Of course. They need clean up.”

Reports pooler Sara Cook on the second commercial break:

The second the stage hand said they were clear for a 4 minute break, Trump turned towards the exit, gave a big sigh through closed lips, and walked off stage without looking at Harris.

From the time the moderators announced they were going to break, Harris began writing on her notepad. She wrote continuously for the entire first two minutes of the break, occasionally bringing one hand to her chin or brushing hair behind her ear. She then reviewed what she wrote for the next minute, making a few tweaks, before putting the pen down and looking out around the room with her hands folded in front of her. She took a sip of water from a glass placed under the lectern.

Trump walked back onstage 30 seconds before the end of break. He did not look at Harris, she did not look at him. Harris made small adjustments to her collar. Both candidates looked straight ahead until the program restarted. Again, no words were spoken.

As it was throughout the debate, a clear contrast:

Julia Ioffe notes wryly that Hillary Clinton won her debates against Donald Trump, too. It’s an important reminder that what liberals and media critics consider a successful performance is not necessarily going to be persuasive to the small segment of swing voters that need to be persuaded in this election.

Donald Trump has promised a big beautiful Obamacare replacement for almost a decade without ever really articulating what it would look like. (It was even unclear when Republicans came close to repealing the Affordable Care Act in 2017.) But never fear: He finally unveiled some specifics on Tuesday night:

“I have concepts of a plan,” won’t rescue Trump from a disastrous performance, but to my weary brain, it’s gold. Not only does it sound like the title of a forgotten shoegaze album; it’s emblematic of Trump himself. He has nothing, really, just bigotry and a handful of vague positions. He specializes in vibes, and bad ones at that. That line was one of his more honest moments. It’ll rattle around in my mind palace for weeks to come.

After Trump accused Democrats for wanting to take away everyone’s firearms, Harris said something surprising: She is a gun owner. It’s not news, however. In 2019, according to CNN, her presidential campaign at the time said she purchased a handgun for personal protection and keeps it locked in a safe.

When Trump was asked about his past comments on Harris’s race, he started out by saying that he doesn’t care at all about how she identifies. And then he doubled down.

“All I can say is I read where she was not Black, that she put out — I’ll say that. And then I read that she was Black and that’s okay,” he said of Harris, who is Black and Indian. “Either one was okay with me. That’s up to her.”

In response, Harris raised Trump’s past examples of racism, spending a significant amount of time on his treatment of the Central Park 5, who were heavily featured at the DNC last month. “It’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently used race to try to divide us,” she said.

Yusef Salaam, a New York City councilman and member of the Central Park 5, is expected to be in the spin room after the debate.

And considering how he’s using that time, Harris is probably fine with that.

Kamala Harris’s response to Donald Trump on the Russia-Ukraine war is not focused on attacking Trump. Instead, she uses it to recount her foreign-policy work, meeting with Zelenskyy and NATO.

One of her most important obstacles to overcome is still that many voters question whether she, or any woman, is strong enough to serve as commander-in-chief.

I am surprised she’s not being more dismissive in her posture. What she is doing is effective, but I was anticipating her emphasizing, for instance, that the reason why she had to introduce herself to Trump at the start of the debate is because he skipped the inauguration, because he was a sore loser, etc. They are both taking each other extremely seriously in their exchanges.

They know it’s not over and that there’s plenty to do, but the overriding feeling I’ve gotten from Democrats close to the Harris campaign over the debate’s first hour is immense relief. So many were scarred by the last debate and downplayed what Harris had to do tonight. But they’re unanimous now that her obvious strategy of getting under Trump’s skin has worked wonders.

One top Democrat who was catatonic during the last debate has just been texting me “YES” “YES” “YES” every few minutes, peaking as Trump rambled about pets being eaten and when Harris started laughing at him.

Their deeper feeling isn’t quite so gleeful. They know her most important audience tonight is undecided voters, not just people who hate Trump, and that this is almost certainly the largest audience she’ll get all campaign long. There’s a half-hour left, and Trump keeps hammering her on the border, one of her biggest weaknesses.

But they’re happy with how she got through the economics section, thrilled with her answers on abortion — her campaign adviser David Plouffe said on X that the campaign’s internal numbers showed a 40-point gap among undecided voters while they were talking — and they clearly see a path to success in letting him ramble incoherently while she tries to present herself as a chance to break beyond the messy, unproductive politics of the last decade. Harris’s campaign says that its live-testing of battleground-state undecided voters hit its lowest point when Trump was going on about insisting he won the 2020 race.

At this point during Trump-Biden debate, the president’s team was desperately hoping no one was watching. Right now, Harris’s is praying that everyone’s tuning in and that this is, like ABC keeps saying, the most consequential debate in history.

In a comment that was even more startling than his description of her as a Marxist, Trump said of Harris that “Biden hates her.” Keep in mind that Biden hand-picked her as his vice-president, then made sure she rather than many other plausible Democrats was his successor when he withdrew from the 2024 race, and then spoke on her behalf at the convention and has been campaigning with her.

So who are you going to believe? Trump or your lying ears and eyes?

Congressional Republicans have tuned into the Trump-Harris debate and, so far, they’re not liking what they’re seeing. Several conceded to reporters that Harris successfully forced Trump off his game:

Senator Lindsey Graham, an ally of Trump, took to social media to complain about the moderators who have heavily fact-checked the former president:

Another response:

After Kamala Harris taunted Trump with the contempt with which world leaders held the former president, Trump had one shining example of a foreign fan who is his validator: Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orban! Aside from the fact that few viewers likely knew who he was talking about, the few who did were probably horrified. Whether you consider Orban a new Franco, or a new Perón, or a new Mussolini, he’s hardly a role model for American leadership.

For what it’s worth:

In an amazing turn of his extraordinarily frequent oscillations on what happened on January 6, Trump now says he had nothing to do with what happened at the Capitol. He just made a speech, and Nancy Pelosi (!) was responsible for what happened. He’s not acknowledging all the steps he took that led up to January 6 or — as David Muir tried to remind him, that he, not Pelosi, not Harris, not Biden — was president that day.

Trump also mentioned the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, a Capitol rioter — then pivoted immediately to immigration yet again. “She is the border czar,” he said falsely of Harris. “What about those people?” he asked. “When are they going to be prosecuted?” He then repeated a line from earlier, saying that crime rates are going down in other countries because criminals are crossing the border. (Violent crime in the United States is down, I should note.) Trump has nothing of substance to say; his only real attack point is immigration, immigration, immigration. He won’t take responsibility for the Capitol Riot and, minutes later, would not admit he lost the election to President Joe Biden before he brought up — you guessed it — immigration. Again.

As completely expected, Donald Trump spouted a lot of lies and gross exaggerations during Tuesday’s debate. But unlike on some other debate nights, the network in charge is doing some effective real-time fact-checking. At least three times, one of the two ABC moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, have stepped in and corrected Trump after particularly egregious answers.

“There is no state in this country where it’s legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Muir announced after Trump falsely claimed otherwise during an answer on abortion.

Muir also informed the audience at home that there is no evidence of immigrants eating dogs in Ohio, which Trump claimed, spinning off a popular conservative conspiracy theory that raced across the internet this week.

Oof:

In a shocking moment, Trump seemed to directly accuse Harris of contributing to the attempt on his life, suggesting her rhetoric played a role. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they said about me,” he said.

It appears to be part of a recent trend from Trump and his circle to raise the specter of conspiracy around the July assassination attempt ahead of the November election. On Monday, Trump’s wife, Melania, shared a video suggesting that there was “more to the story” of the shooting.

ABC asked Vice-President Harris about her previous positions calling for a fracking ban, a mandatory assault-weapons buyback, and decriminalizing immigration enforcement.

Harris in her reply says she supports fracking, and notes the Inflation Reduction Act, which she voted for, expanded fracking. But she doesn’t mention the other issues, and retreats into a generalized defense of her values. It’s her weakest response so far.

Trump raised a debunked racist hoax on the stage, claiming that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating and killing residents’ pets. The rumors have been shared by Republican allies of Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there and this is what’s happening in our country,” he said.

Debate moderator David Muir cut in to correct Trump on his claim, but Trump continued on, saying that people have said so on TV.

When it was her turn to speak, Harris seemed pleased with the exchange. “I mean, talk about extreme,” she said with a laugh.

Harris’s powerful abortion answer wasn’t just her strongest rhetorical moment; it was directly responsive to the contemporary hellscape of women sitting in parking lots bleeding out, patients being forced to cross state lines for their procedures, minors being forced to stay pregnant after assault, and IVF in the crosshairs. Before Roe v. Wade was overturned, this probably felt theoretical to a lot of Americans, and polls were all over the place. Now, all of the aforementioned stories are real.

Meanwhile, Trump’s trying to run an old playbook on abortion, the one the Susan B. Anthony List historically encouraged: trying to make Democrats squirm by bringing up later abortions, or as he put it to Hillary Clinton back in 2016, claiming that they support “the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby,” and lying about so-called post-birth abortions, which do not exist. (He was distorting comments made about newborn hospice and confusing West Virginia and Virginia in the process.) The problem for him is that he’s talking hypotheticals about a past that he can’t substantiate, while every day, Americans read headlines about real-life consequences that have profoundly affected public opinion.

I have good and bad news if you had “Trump shouts out the ‘late great Hannibal Lecter’” on your debate bingo card. Harris brought up Trump’s favorite fictional cannibal as an example of the unhinged things Trump says at his rallies rather than focusing on ways to help the American people.

On abortion, former president Donald Trump offered a rambling, if familiar, answer, saying falsely that liberal states “have abortion in the ninth month.” Then he misspoke in the process of lying: He claimed the the governor of West Virginia wanted to execute babies after birth, when he usually means Ralph Northam, the former governor of Virginia. “For 52 years they’ve been trying to get Roe v. Wade into the states,” he said and praised the “genius, heart and strength” of his chosen Supreme Court justices, who voted to overturn Roe. This is typical Trump: He wants to take credit for killing Roe, a decision that he claims, falsely, is popular, but he doesn’t want to answer direct questions about his own position on issues like Florida’s abortion referendum.

Then Vice-President Kamala Harris swiftly and decisively put him on the defensive, referring to “Trump abortion bans” in conservative-controlled states and describing the human consequences of those bans. Some don’t have exceptions for rape or incest, she said, adding, “That is immoral.” People do not have to “abandon their faith or their deeply held beliefs” in order to oppose the government — and Trump — making reproductive decisions for them.

It was an effective line of attack, and Trump didn’t credibly respond. All he could do was accuse Harris (again, falsely) of supporting abortion as late as the ninth month of pregnancy “and probably after birth.” If Trump thinks he can appeal to moderates and independents by claiming to support certain exceptions to abortion bans, he’s failing. His arsenal contains lies and not much else. As personal stories of harm emerge in states with bans on the books, it’s harder and harder for Trump to distance himself from the world he’s created — and would reinforce if reelected president.

“Will you veto a national abortion ban?” asks a moderator. “Well, I won’t have to,” Trump replies. Trump hems and haws about whether a national abortion law will pass Congress. He is told that J.D. Vance promised he would veto a national abortion ban. Trump replies that he didn’t talk to Vance.

That sure sounds like he wouldn’t veto a ban.

Trump’s advisers were preoccupied with two things ahead of the debate: (1) Prevent him from getting angered by whatever Harris says, which they worried would knock him off message. (2) Encourage him to hang back, in the hopes that Harris might be forced to talk more expansively, which they hoped would lead to her producing mangled sentences they could utilize in service of their argument that she speaks incoherently (as opposed to Trump, who is of course famously coherent.)

Just a few minutes in, he’s already angry. It seemed to start with Harris mentioning the Wharton School, which was an artful way to trigger him and it worked instantly. Now he is speaking at a high volume and rather aggressively. He is still on message, but for how long? Harris meanwhile seems to be tailoring her facial expressions for memes. People looking in a befuddled way at Donald Trump is a robust genre already, and I expect she’ll make a meaningful contribution to that trove by the end of the night.

Trump seemed to briefly mix up the two Virginias during a winding response on abortion. While inaccurately claiming that states are performing abortions after nine months, Trump appeared to make a reference to former Virginia governor Ralph Northam, praising his successor and ally Glenn Youngkin, but said West Virginia instead. A mix-up that likely won’t endear him to the commonwealth.

After initially claiming that Harris was just a Biden rubber-stamp and then that she had no policies at all, Trump suddenly lurched into a flat assertion that Harris is a Marxist, alluding to the occasional description her father as a “Marxist economist.” He offered no explanation of this claim, but guess Harris is lucky he didn’t call her a “communist” as he often has.

The economy is one of Trump’s best issues, per polling. The race is basically tied, and Trump’s strength is the perception he is an economic mastermind — a perception that is winning over some voters who otherwise don’t like him. Trump needs to win a clear victory on the economy. I don’t think he did at all, but we’ll see what the viewers think.

Kamala Harris not only quoted Trump praising Xi Jinping’s handling of COVID; she noted China’s lack of transparency on the origins of the pandemic. That is an interesting position for her to take, and a correct one, in my view. But it’s also one conservatives have largely owned, because some progressives have treated the hypothesis that the pandemic emerged from a lab as a conspiracy theory. Harris seems to be taking the other side.

One of the Democrats’ most effective attack lines against Donald Trump and other Republicans this year has been Project 2025, the draconian playbook the Heritage Foundation and conservatives government cooked up for a second Trump presidency. Harris mentioned it early on even though the answer had little to do with the question Harris is asked, but it likely won’t be the first time she hits it tonight.

Trump, on the defensive, claimed ignorance. “I haven’t read it, I don’t want to read it,” he said.

When the two candidates came out, one question was answered when Kamala Harris approached Trump with a handshake that he awkwardly answered. The first question to Harris reprised the famous 1980 Reagan debate question: “Are [we] better off than four years ago?” She did not answer but instead went into her stock “opportunity economy” message, followed by a brisk denunciation of Trump’s economic agenda of tax cuts and tariffs. Following up, Trump introduced alleged uncontrolled immigration as wrecking the economy, and in a series of follow-ups, the two candidates hammered each other along the lines we expected, with Harris citing Project 2025 and Trump mocking Harris’s policy specifics.

After much speculation it wouldn’t happen, there was indeed a handshake, but it didn’t come easily. Harris clearly insisted and had to walk all the way to Trump’s lectern to make it happen. “Kamala Harris. Let’s have a good debate,” she said. Trump replied, “Nice to see you, have fun.” Awkward!

If my colleague Sarah Jones is right that Trump could “get nasty — and racist — fast” on immigration once the debate begins, then Kamala Harris will have a strategic decision to make on how to handle one of Trump’s signature issues. Up until now, she’s basically dealt with immigration by endorsing the bipartisan border-control bill that Trump killed earlier this year and moved on to other issues. But should Trump really go wild, she might consider poking him a bit on the implications of his promise to launch the greatest “mass deportation” in American history, involving every undocumented immigrant. Because of their defensiveness on the issue, Democrats have not raised alarms about the details of this terrible-sounding plan or the implications for Latino citizens and legal immigrants. who may be hassled or even rounded up in such an effort. Trump needs to pay a price for this very un-American America First idea.

Staffer 1: The debate room looks like Avatar.

Staffer 2: rather aquatic

Staffer 1: the podiums look different height

Staffer 4: it’s making me feel a little insane

Staffer 1: Trump is going to lose it

Staffer 5: Shouldn’t the plural be “podia”? Yet it isn’t, strange

Staffer 1: I went to a state school

Four minutes later…

Staffer 5: FYI, according to this AI Overview, “The plural of the word ‘podium’ is ‘podiums’ or ‘podia’”

Six minutes later…

Staffer 6: Chiming in to note that these are neither podiums nor podia. They are lecterns. The podium is the thing you stand on, not the thing you stand at.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer was seen leaving Trump’s plane after it arrived in Philadelphia. Loomer’s presence is notable for her extremism: She has called Islam “a cancer” and celebrated the deaths of migrants who were crossing the Mediterranean. On an extremist podcast in 2017, Loomer, who is Jewish, said, “Someone asked me, ‘Are you pro-white nationalism?’ Yes. I’m pro-white nationalism.”

Nevertheless, Trump supported her failed 2020 congressional race in Florida, she has flown on his plane in the past, and he reportedly wanted to hire her for a campaign role — until aides intervened, the Washington Post reported. With Loomer onboard, Trump may be in a pugnacious mood, especially on immigration. On Truth Social yesterday and today, he repeatedly boosted the viral lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are kidnapping and eating pets, and Republicans have tried to link Vice-President Harris to President Biden’s immigration policy with that rumor and in other talking points. The debate has yet to start, but expect Trump to quickly get nasty — and racist — once it begins.

At the end of the June 27 debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, CNN moderators tried three times to get a clear answer from Trump as to whether he would accept defeat in November. Indeed, not that a single person noticed, but Biden’s last words before the candidates went to closing remarks trolled and mocked Trump for his refusal to answer what turned out to be the $64,000 question of the 2020 election:

You’re a whiner. When you lost the first time, you continued to appeal and appeal to courts all across the country. Not one single court in America said any of your claims had any merit, state or local, none. But you continue to promote this lie about somehow there’s all this misrepresentation, all the stealing. There’s no evidence of that at all. And I tell you what? I doubt whether you’ll accept it because you’re such a whiner.

The odds are very high that the same fraught question will come up tonight and that Trump will again hedge and change the subject. Unless the moderators can find a more precise way to elicit a clear answer, Harris may need to do so herself with a pledge of her own.

There are at least a couple of benchmarks moderators or Harris could suggest for a concrete agreement by the candidates not to let the contest go until another horrifying January in Washington. One would be to accept the results if the election is called by the Associated Press and all the major networks, including Fox News. Another is to accept the results as certified by governors (or the highest election official in each state), which federal law requires by December 11. If Trump rejects a moderator or Harris challenge to go along with any benchmark other than his subjective determination the election is “fair,” it will be safe to conclude he’s planning another election coup.

Politico reports that Trump Force One arrived with a lot of extra passengers, including “Stephen Miller, Natalie Harp, Laura Loomer, Vince Haley, Ross Worthington, John Coale, Steve Witkoff, Lara Trump, Alina Habba, Chris LaCivita, Steven Cheung, Susie Wiles, Corey Lewandowski, Eric Trump, Taylor Budowich, Tulsi Gabbard, Rep. Matt Gaetz, Margo Martin, Jason Miller, Boris Ephsteyn, Walt Nauta and Dan Scavino.”

ABC News seems rather noncommittal, per the New York Times:

Rick Klein, ABC News’s political director and a lead organizer of Tuesday’s debate, said in an interview that the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, were “there to facilitate a discussion” and that “the debate belongs to the candidates.”

Is there a role for the moderators to fact-check?

“I don’t think it’s a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ proposition,” Mr. Klein said. “We’re not making a commitment to fact-check everything, or fact-check nothing, in either direction. We’re there to keep a conversation going, and to facilitate a good solid debate, and that entails a lot of things in terms of asking questions, moving the conversation along, making sure that it’s civilized.”

Greetings from the extremely air-conditioned press filing center–slash–spin room in Philadelphia, where I just settled in after almost running straight into a very busy looking Marco Rubio at my hotel a few blocks away. (He must be here spinning for Donald Trump.)

I spent most of today checking in with Democrats inside of and close to Kamala Harris’s campaign to see how they’re feeling, what they expect, what they want to see, and what they’re nervous about. I got a lot of different answers, but one thing stuck out: Basically, all of them agreed that more pressure is on Harris tonight, if only because she’s the new character in the race and the one voters are still interested in hearing more from. (The consensus: Voters know exactly who Trump is and don’t need any new information about him, thank you very much.)

Harris knows this, obviously. As I reported over the weekend, she hasn’t been prepping to deliver some sort of devastating knockout blow to Trump but instead has been thinking about the best ways to present herself as representing a new political era. That’s probably going to mean talking plenty about Trump’s record, naturally — but just as much, if not more, about her vision for the economy.

Of course, we’ll see how this all goes to plan or rather how quickly it veers into unexpected territory. As one Democratic pollster told me this afternoon, reliable research about debate audiences shows 70 percent of what matters to voters is the visual and the performance rather than the substance of what the candidates say.

So yes, Harris will be eager to let Trump be Trump, to put it mildly. Her campaign has been trolling Trump on the airwaves and with billboards about, uh, crowd size here in Philly. If he goes unhinged early, they’ll consider it a win. One top Democrat I talked to didn’t disagree that the pressure was on her but said the bar was pretty low after Biden’s performance this summer. Instead, this person suggested, Harris’s job is just to be the normal adult onstage. Isn’t that what exhausted voters want?

Spin-room drama abounds:

At a campaign stop in Arizona, he told supporters that Harris would use the debate to introduce their ticket to more of the country — and the contrast with Trump would be obvious:

Tonight you’re going to watch Vice President Harris lay out a plan for this country, a new way forward. You’re going to hear her talk about an economy that is an opportunity economy where everybody matters.

She’s going to talk about education being a path to a better future, not long term student loan debt. She’s going to talk about tackling some of the toughest problems like climate change and doing it in a way that grows our economy.

Now if you did a split screen to that, on the other side of that screen, you’re going to see a nearly 80 year old man who’s in it for himself talk about revenge and talk about how bad this country is, and talk us down on everything he does. …

Let’s not let a single person, make the case that there is not an absolutely crystal clear difference of a positive forward America, or one that is small, petty, backwards and we’re done with it.

Hours before the debate, Donald Trump added a surreal note to the event by pitching a fit on Truth Social and demanding that congressional Republicans shut down the federal government at the end of September if Democrats don’t accept a ridiculous and redundant proposal to federalize state election systems in order to address a completely made-up crisis over noncitizen voting:

If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO “STUFF” VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN - CLOSE IT DOWN!!!

By way of background, House Republicans earlier this year pushed through the so-called SAVE Act, reflecting Trump’s 100 percent unsubstantiated claims that Democrats are planning to flood the polls with voting by noncitizens. Noncitizen voting is already illegal in all 50 states with prison sentences and deportation the available penalties for the incredibly rare violation.

Congressional Republicans led by House Speaker Mike Johnson understood all along this was a empty “messaging” bill not designed to become law but to underline a MAGA campaign talking point. But now Trump has blown up that harmless if demagogic gesture by demanding that Johnson (and also Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who is likely to openly mock this gesture) refuse to go along with a stopgap spending plan at the end of the fiscal year that is necessary to keep the federal government operating. There is zero chance the Senate or the White House will go along with this demand, which would require all 50 states completely redo their process for voter registration right before a national election for absolutely no good reason. Johnson agreed to prioritize this dumb legislation in the first place because he needed Trump’s protection from a potential coup by the House Freedom Caucus, which was angry at Johnson for not shutting down the government earlier this year. Now, the dispute could become very real for federal employees and beneficiaries of key federal programs and services.

This is a very old theme for Trump despite its fictional underpinnings. When he won in 2016, he complained that he would have won the national popular vote (which he lost by over 2-and-a-half million votes) if not for “millions of illegal votes.” He offered zero evidence for this claim. He’s brought back the phantom menace of noncitizen voting this year as part of a broader claim that Democrats have opened up the borders to bring in migrants who will immediately be marched to the polls to reelect their socialist benefactors. You can understand how this hoax appeals to Trump since it combines his signature immigration and “stolen election” themes. Either Harris or the debate moderators should consider demanding that Trump cite some actual evidence that any of this is happening, not that hard-core MAGA folk need any for this version of the Great Replacement Theory.

On the political betting site Polymarket, most bettors don’t think Harris and Trump will shake hands tonight:

Illustration: Screencap/Polymarket

The odds are probably even worse than that, since there hasn’t been a presidential debate handshake since the first Trump-Clinton debate in 2016.

From my debate preview this morning, Harris has her work cut out for her:

Without question, [she] has the more complicated task: defining herself to viewers as an agent of change from the Biden-Trump era of politics, and a much safer option than an extremist second Trump administration. This means anticipating and rebutting Trump claims that she is responsible for Biden’s alleged policy failures and is more radical than Biden himself. And it also means casting some light through the fog of endless commentary about Trump to convincingly express concerns about what he will do if restored to power.

Trump, meanwhile, needs to focus on pigeonholing:

Trump’s biggest advantage is the extremely low standard he has set throughout his career for either coherence or civility. Almost anyone else would be afflicted with a dilemma as to whether to accuse Harris of being Biden 2.0 or a “communist,” since Biden is nobody’s idea of a dedicated Marxist-Leninist revolutionary. Trump can blithely pursue both angles of attack simultaneously, because that’s just who he is. Calling Harris a “radical” or a “Marxist” or a “communist” is what passes for a substantive comment from the former president, and he would be wise to stick with ideologically freighted criticism rather than slandering her personally (i.e., he should leave the blatantly racist and sexist patter to MAGA social media).

Above all, the 45th president needs to do everything he can to fan doubts about Harris, making her out to be the “risky change” candidate and returning the election to a competition between highly motivated party bases with swing voters ultimately focused on their unhappiness with life as it is.

Read the rest here.

It will be broadcast live at 9 p.m. ET on ABC and simulcast on multiple other networks, including C-Span, PBS, MSNBC, and Fox News. The debate will also be streamed live on ABC.com and ABC News’ YouTube channel (for people without cable or streaming-service subscriptions), as well as on ABC News Live, Disney+, and Hulu.