ANALYSIS | Harris toys with Trump in U.S. presidential debate | CBC News

Kamala Harris exorcised the ghosts of June. After needling Donald Trump in their televised debate, nudging him off topic, she finally stuck the landing that famously eluded her boss.

It was a catastrophic cognitive blip in June’s debate that ultimately curtailed President Joe Biden’s career when he lost his train of thought and erroneously boasted that he’d crushed a public health-insurance system cherished by seniors: “I beat Medicare.”

Coming from the vice-president, on Tuesday, the same message sounded more coherent: “We have allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices — on behalf of you, the American people.” 

By this point, it was already late in the debate, and Democrats were giddy, Republicans were fuming about biased moderators, and Harris was enjoying a little bump from different online betting markets in her chances of becoming president.

At a basement watch party in North Carolina, her supporters expressed relief over a late-summer debate that bookended the early-summer disaster.

“It was so disheartening. A horrible, sinking feeling,” Yana Whitman of Asheville said of the June Biden debate. Now? “She’s doing a great job,” she said of Harris. “She’s embarrassing [Trump].”

She was referring, specifically, to Harris dropping little ego land mines for Trump – references to supporters leaving his rallies, or world leaders mocking him – right at moments of the debate where he could have done damage to her, like a discussion about the porous southern border.

‘First, let me respond to the rallies’

Trump couldn’t resist diving right in to rescue his pride. Instead of discussing the border he said: “First, let me respond to the rallies.” Trump added: “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” 

He then pivoted to the possibility of another world war, spread a conspiracy theory about immigrants eating people’s pets, and, finally, wound up back where he started: Talking again about his rallies.

The border was supposed to be his winning topic. Instead, he played into hers: the notion, raised repeatedly by Harris, that Trump cares about himself, not ordinary people. She even got Trump to complain again about the 2020 election being stolen, and to defend his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Donnie Jones didn’t bother watching the first debate: the North Carolina graphic designer says he’s an independent, tends to vote Democratic, and isn’t a political junkie. 

But he said he started getting excited about the campaign a few weeks ago, and there he was Tuesday, at a watch party in the basement of a wooden house on a dead end on the outskirts of Asheville, at the Democratic Party’s county headquarters.

“I’m feeling good now,” he said.

Trump fans say he won debate

Some Republicans insisted they also felt good Tuesday. Trump, for his part, posted a string of unscientific polls where his fans declared he’d won. 

“I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!” Trump wrote on his social-media site, Truth Social.

That was a reference to the moderators correcting him several times. Such as when he accused Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating pets: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats,” Trump said.

This was based on flimsily-sourced social media posts involving a town that has, indeed, seen an influx in undocumented migration.

WATCH | Moderator corrects Trump on ‘eating the pets’ comment:  

Moderator fact-checks Trump’s claim that illegal immigrants are ‘eating the pets’

After Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed that illegal immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, ABC News Presidential Debate moderator David Muir said the city manager told ABC News ‘there have been no credible reports’ of such incidents.

Republicans fume at moderators

ABC’s moderator said the network had checked with the mayor and he said there were no reports of pets being kidnapped for food. Trump replied that he’d seen it on TV.

It is true that the moderators only corrected Trump. They did not intervene to challenge Harris different times when she quoted Trump out of context, including his recent prediction of a bloodbath in the auto sector because of Democrats’ trade policy on electric cars.

Harris suggested he was threatening political violence. 

“Unfortunately we had moderators who were clearly biased. Who were constantly fact-checking Donald Trump but none of these kind of whoppers the vice-president was saying,” Trump’s new campaign ally, Robert Kennedy Jr., said on Newsmax.

But as two Republican panellists on CNN conceded afterward: Trump had a poor night. One used a basketball metaphor, saying it’s no use complaining about the ref if you don’t make the shot.

Trump pressed Harris briefly over several left-wing policies from her failed 2020 campaign, which she now repudiates; he questioned why she should be trusted to achieve anything the current administration hasn’t. 

And he complained about being described as a menace to democracy, when he’s the one facing myriad criminal charges, and was just shot.

“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me,” Trump said. “They talk about democracy. That I’m a threat to democracy. They’re the threat.” 

But when Harris got a chance to address her own chosen topics she charged ahead.

On abortion, for instance. Trump has waffled on how he would handle it in a second term: he’s said he wouldn’t, then said he could, restrict access to abortion pills, and it’s unclear whether a Trump-led postal service would halt interstate shipments of the medication. 

Trump took credit for appointing judges who ended Roe v. Wade, saying he’d given the country what it wanted: a chance to settle the issue on a state-by-state basis.

WATCH | Harris speaks on abortion rights: 

‘Bleeding out in a car’ due to abortion restrictions is not what America wants, Harris says

‘The government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,’ Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said during the ABC News Presidential Debate on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

Confrontation on abortion

Harris tore into him. She described cases of women who have suffered the consequences, like a miscarriage and doctors too afraid to intervene.

“She’s bleeding out in a car in a parking lot. She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that,” Harris said.

While discussing the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Harris spoke directly to moderate Republican voters disgusted by the events of that day.

She joked that Trump was fired by 81 million voters and he’s having a difficult time processing that. And she invited Republican voters to support her: “There is a place for you. To stand for country. To stand for democracy. To stand for rule of law. … Let’s not go back.” 

It was part of an unambiguous pitch to centre- and some centre-right voters. Harris described herself as a gun owner, and promised not to confiscate firearms.

She touted recent record oil production. This was the only moment that drew a boo from someone at the Democratic watch party. 

Debates don’t always mean much

She boasted about having the support of Dick Cheney, the former Republican vice-president, and referred to the Republicans’ 2008 presidential nominee as, “The late, great John McCain,” while discussing his 2017 Senate vote to save Barack Obama’s health-care law.  

Now, a brief reality check for those giddy Democrats.

Debate performances aren’t necessarily predictive of electoral success. Hillary Clinton won her first, second and third debates against Trump, according to polls in 2016. She then enjoyed a small bump in support. 

These contests tend to budge the polls a point or two in the direction of the perceived winner. It’s sometimes an ephemeral mirage, as supporters of the so-called winning debater are briefly more enthusiastic about talking to pollsters. 

Case in point, Mitt Romney in 2012 who, like Clinton in 2016, was believed to have dominated his first debate with Obama, then lost the election.

That’s what makes the Biden disaster in June such an anomaly. That bumbling performance was easily the most consequential televised debate in U.S. history, leading to the end of his campaign. 

After Tuesday, it feels like more distant history.