How resounding was Kamala Harris’s debate win? Let’s look at the polls
Vice President Kamala Harris turned in one of the more resounding debate performances in recent decades on Tuesday night — to the point where Donald Trump’s allies have struggled to locate a silver lining.
Precisely how much the debate could impact the race is an open question, as my colleague Dan Balz notes; we’re a very polarized country, and we don’t generally see big and sudden shifts in polls anymore. But small margins can matter greatly in our increasingly tight elections, and Harris clearly helped her cause.
So just how emphatic was her win? And what do the polls suggest about what it could mean moving forward?
We’ve so far seen two instant polls — one from CNN and another from YouGov.
The CNN poll showed Harris winning the debate 63 percent to 37 percent among debate-watchers, while the YouGov poll showed her winning 54-31 among registered voters who watched at least some of the debate, with 14 percent unsure. (Trump has cited his own improbably wide margins in some unscientific online polls — posting a series of them on Truth Social — but those polls don’t reflect the actual electorate.)
Notably, those margins are close to the ones Trump racked up after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27, a performance that ultimately led him to drop out of the 2024 race. Back then, the CNN poll showed Trump winning the debate 67-33, while the YouGov poll showed Trump winning 43-22.
Harris’s performance also ranks up there with the more decisive wins in recent history, according to CNN’s numbers, though it’s worth noting that a strong debate doesn’t always necessarily translate into a White House victory. [Continue reading…]
Harris’ victory on Tuesday was so clear that even Fox News had to accept reality.
“Make no mistake about it: Trump had a bad night,” Brit Hume, Fox News chief political analyst, said shortly after the event. “He lost the debate repeatedly when she baited him, something I’m sure his advisors had begged him not to do. And we heard so many of the old grievances that we’ve long thought that Trump had learned were not winners politically.”
Hume wasn’t alone. As my colleague Noah Lanard reported, several right-wing bloggers and online personalities admitted that Trump had bombed, even after their man pushed some of their worst pieces of misinformation at the debate stage. [Continue reading…]
Last night in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris did to Donald Trump what Donald Trump had done to Joe Biden: She broke her opponent on a debate stage.
I’ve been watching presidential debates since 1976, and I’ve even been peripherally involved in a few. And I’ve never seen a candidate execute a debate strategy as well as Harris did.
The night, for Harris supporters, went better than even the most optimistic among them could have hoped. For Trump supporters, it was not just a defeat but a public humiliation, the crushing comeuppance they probably secretly feared might one day arrive but, until now, never quite had.
What Harris appeared to understand, better than anyone else who has debated Trump, is that the key to defeating him is to trigger him psychologically. She did it by repeatedly calling him “weak,” mocking him, acting bemused by him, and literally laughing at him. As he lost control of events, Trump became enraged, his voice bellowing into an empty room, his face not just orange but nearly fluorescent. Trump realized that his opponent—and not just any opponent, but a woman of color—was dominating him. And so even as Trump exploded, he was, like a dying supernova, shrinking before our eyes.
Even so devoted a bootlicker as Senator Lindsey Graham declared the debate a “disaster” for the ex-president. [Continue reading…]