Sarah Longwell writes:

Last night, Trump was, in a certain sense, a stand-in for strongmen like Putin and Xi, and the voters I spoke with right after the debate said that Harris held her own. They appreciated her ability to bait Trump, counter his lies, and look calm while doing it. Her decision to point out how easily foreign despots use flattery to influence Trump also did her a lot of good.

“I was actually pleasantly surprised at Harris,” said Jennifer, a swing voter from Georgia. “She addressed most of the issues pretty well, and she gave Donald Trump what other candidates couldn’t. She was a little bit sarcastic, talking back with him, which I appreciated.”

Jay, a swing voter from Arizona, said of the debate: “Her objective of getting under his skin to unveil what’s really behind the curtain—I think she did a really good job.”

Trump’s team has done itself few favors with women during this campaign. Comments by the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, about childless cat ladies, giving more votes to people with children, and the role of “postmenopausal females” aren’t just off-putting; they accentuate the ticket’s core vulnerabilities on abortion and women’s rights.

“I have a really hard time getting past the ‘cat ladies’ and how, if you’re childless, you don’t have as much of a stake in the future of America,” Faith, the Pennsylvania voter, said after the debate. “He is too conservative for my liking. He is too fundamentalist for my liking.”

It turns out that this kind of outright misogyny concerns people. And it isn’t just women who feel this way. [Continue reading…]