Election 2024: Did the Harris-Trump Debate Reset the Presidential Race?

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held their much-anticipated presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday night. An estimated 67.1 million people tuned in to watch, an audience nearly a third larger than the one that watched Trump square off against Joe Biden back in June. By most accounts—though not Trump’s—Harris emerged the victor.

Perhaps most important for Harris, she looks to have passed the commander-in-chief test. Going into the debate, Trump had argued that the world leaders would treat her “like a play toy.” After Harris repeatedly lit into Trump at the debate and had him on the defensive, that narrative looks far harder to sustain.

Does Harris’s success mean that the fundamental dynamics of the race have changed? Probably not. Yes, some debates change everything. Just ask President Biden. But despite the hullabaloo that builds up every four years about presidential debates, they seldom move the political needle much or in a lasting fashion. Hillary Clinton was judged to have won her debates against Trump in 2016. She saw a bump in her poll numbers. Her lead didn’t last.

Of course, Clinton didn’t have the benefit of having Taylor Swift endorse her immediately following a debate as Harris did. The world’s biggest star also shared a link to vote.gov showing how to register to vote. More than 400,000 people visited the site in the following twenty-four hours. That’s more than thirteen times the traffic the site receives in a typical day. Celebrity endorsements can matter. But visiting a website is a far cry from registering to vote, let alone voting in a battleground state that could change the outcome of the election.

One reason debates generally don’t make a difference is that most viewers already know who they support. They are tuning in to root for their favored candidate rather than to be persuaded to switch sides. A bad performance is just something to shrug off. Biden voters didn’t join the Trump cause in late June because their man faltered in the spotlight.

At the same time, debates don’t freeze campaigns in amber. While the Harris team is looking to amplify the conclusion that she won, the Trump team is working to persuade wavering and undecided voters to rethink what they saw and heard. That’s why Trump and his supporters are leaning hard into the claim that he was disadvantaged because he had to square off against not one opponent in the debate but three. Beyond that, events and miscues by either candidate could have voters quickly forgetting what the candidates said in Philadelphia.

On that score, the big question following Tuesday night’s debate was whether there would be a sequel. The Harris campaign challenged Trump to a rematch even as stagehands were still striking the set in Philadelphia. While Trump had said he would debate Biden “any time, any place,” his response to reporters in the media scrum after Tuesday night’s debate was: “We’ll look at it, but they want a second debate because they lost.” On Wednesday morning, he said he was “not inclined to do” another debate unless it was on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, and Laura Ingraham as the moderators. Yesterday afternoon, he took to Truth Social to declare: “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” 

That may or may not settle things. Last night, Harris ignored Trump’s declaration and said “we owe it to the voters to have another debate.” Expect the Harris campaign to needle Trump about his sudden aversion to debates in a bid to goad him into changing his mind, something he has done more than once in his career. Even if Trump stands firm, the Harris team will see the attacks as a way to dent his persona of strength.

While those atmospherics play out, both campaigns will be honing their messages and working on turning out the vote in battleground states. Harris and Trump both know that the race remains a toss-up with early voting about to begin in many states and with Election Day just over seven weeks away. Any mistakes from here on out will be hard to overcome. Don’t expect either campaign to give an inch. Do expect the campaigning—by the campaigns and by aligned groups—to become even more hard-edged. Politics, as the saying goes, ain’t beanbag.

Campaign Update

Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, released a report on Sunday calling the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan “willful blindness.” With Election Day less than two months away, the report went out of its way to criticize Harris. As Politico noted, an interim report that McCaul released in 2022 mentioned Harris just twice. The new report mentions her more than 250 times.

Perhaps not coincidentally, on Monday, nine retired flag officers and a retired master sergeant of the U.S. Marine Corps released a letter saying that “Harris is the best—and only—presidential candidate in this race who is fit to serve as our commander-in-chief.” The group added that Trump’s failed deal-making in Afghanistan “severely hindered the Biden-Harris Administration’s ability to execute the most orderly withdrawal possible and put our service members and our allies at risk.”

Last Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin trolled the Harris campaign by telling a group in Vladivostok that he was supporting Harris for president, saying: “She laughs so expressively and infectiously that it means that she is doing well.” He added that Trump placed “so many restrictions and sanctions against Russia like no other president has ever introduced before him.” The giveaway that Putin wasn’t serious was his claim that “our ‘favorite,’ if you can call it that, was the current president, Mr. [Joe] Biden.” Sure.

The judge in the Georgia election interference case threw out two more charges against Trump. However, the judge declined a request from Trump’s lawyers to throw out all the charges. The original indictment charged Trump with thirteen criminal violations; he now faces eight charges. The trial itself is unlikely to take place if Trump wins in November.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. got good news last Friday. Appeals courts in Michigan and North Carolina ruled that his name should be removed from their state’s election ballots. One consequence of the ruling is that North Carolina did not send out mail-in ballots on Friday, as planned. North Carolina’s Supreme Court on Monday in a 4-3 vote confirmed the decision to take Kennedy’s name off the state ballot. The decision means that nearly three million freshly printed ballots will be thrown out. It will take the North Carolina Election Board a while to print ones. The state has 2,348 ballot styles because who is running in congressional and local races varies from town to town. With North Carolina’s ballot on hold, Alabama became the first state in the nation to begin sending general election ballots to absentee voters. The ballots went out yesterday.

Speaking of ballot issues, a judge in Georgia disqualified third-party candidate Cornel West as a presidential candidate in the state on the grounds that he failed to file the proper paperwork. That ruling created a problem. West’s name is already on the state’s printed ballots, and it’s too late to take his name off. The ballots are scheduled to be sent to military and overseas voters next week. Unless the Georgia Supreme Court overturns the decision, votes for West won’t be counted. With the vote in Georgia expected to be close between Harris and Trump, Democrats worry that West could pick up votes that deny the vice president victory in the Peachtree State.

The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday designated the certification of the 2024 presidential vote at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2025, a “special national security event.” The designation, which typically applies to events like the Super Bowl, provides additional resources to create a security plan for the certification and to prevent a reoccurrence of the violence that Americans witnessed on January 6, 2021.

What the Candidates Are Saying

If Tuesday night’s debate likely didn’t change the course of the race, it did showcase contrasting visions of where the United States is and where it needs to go. That was particularly the case with foreign policy. Lawfare summarized the conversation well. Trump laid out:

a vision in which the primary threat to America is migration across our southern border, in which foreign trade partners and allies alike are fleecing and taking advantage of America and weak American leaders are unable or unwilling to protect our interests, and in which we face the possibility of a nuclear war with Russia over the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine.

Harris offered a vision in which:

the southern border is a manageable problem, Trump himself—not immigration—presents the major threat to the rule of law, America needs to stand by our allies and benefits from its network of alliances around the world, and America’s position in the world is menaced by Trump’s own solicitude for dictators.”

Voters clearly face a choice and not an echo in November.

Little of what the two candidates said about foreign policy was new. Trump again touted tariffs as a cure-all for most of what ails the United States and again said, wrongly, that foreign countries and not Americans pay tariffs. The moment that was perhaps most alarming to U.S. allies in Europe—and to many Americans as well—was Trump’s refusal to say whether he thought it was in the U.S. national interest for Ukraine to win its war against Russia. While avoiding the question, Trump did say, wrongly, that the United States has sent almost twice as much aid to Ukraine as all of Europe combined. The reality is that Europe has spent more on Ukraine than the United States has. Neither Harris nor the moderators corrected what Trump said about tariffs or aid to Ukraine.

Harris was asked about the war in Gaza. She said, as she has many times before, that Israel has a right to defend itself, called for a ceasefire, and endorsed a two-state solution. She said nothing about how she would achieve either of those latter two ends. When asked in the final question about climate change, she touted the importance of building a clean energy economy but skipped over how she would make that happen. Harris did say that the Biden administration had “increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” That is true, but it probably is not something that had climate activists cheering.

The Harris campaign on Sunday posted a policy page on its website. Organized under the title “A New Way Forward,” the page lists four categories of issues: “Build an Opportunity Economy and Lower Costs for Families,” “Safeguard Our Fundamental Freedoms,” “Ensure Safety and Justice for All,” and “Keep America Safe, Secure, and Prosperous.” As with most candidates’ policy pages, Harris’s is long on promises and short on the steps to achieve them. For instance, when it comes to meeting the China challenge, the Harris campaign promises:

She will invest in the competitive advantages that make America the strongest nation on Earth—American workers, innovation, and industry—and will work to ensure America remains a leader in the industries of the future, from semiconductors to clean energy to artificial intelligence.

Harris’s policy pages also seek to “help” undecided voters by providing a contrasting, and not flattering, summary of “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda” on each issue.

Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin last Saturday that he would impose a 100 percent import tariff on  countries that are looking to lessen or end their use of U.S. dollars to finance their international transactions. He didn’t offer any specifics on which countries would qualify for the tariffs or what threshold of non-dollar transactions would trigger them. The goal of the proposal is to reinforce the dollar’s role as the world’s main reserve currency. Brazil, China, Russia, and other countries have discussed ways to “de-dollarize” the global economy because, among other things, the dollar’s prominence gives Washington economic leverage against everyone else, as Moscow discovered with the financial sanctions levied in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine. As my colleague Brad Setser has pointed out, Trump’s proposal, if it were enacted, would most likely backfire on the United States by making the dollar “less attractive as a global currency over time.” It would also fuel inflation in the United States.

What the Pundits Are Saying

Politico’s Nahal Toosi argued that Tuesday’s debate showed the rest of the world that Harris is ready to be president. According to Toosi, “by the time the debate was over, several foreign officials from both U.S. allies and more neutral countries told me they felt more confident that Harris could handle the tricky personalities she’d encounter while in the world’s most powerful job.”

Foreign Policy’s Matt Kroenig argued that the world should stop worrying about a second Trump term. According to Kroenig, “an evenhanded assessment of the record shows that Trump was an effective foreign-policy president, presiding over a period of relative global stability and prosperity, and a second Trump administration promises improved performance based on the lessons learned in the first term.” Kroenig’s equanimity is largely predicated on the fact that “personnel is policy, and there are many accomplished candidates rumored to be in the running for top foreign-policy posts in a second Trump administration, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Tom Cotton, former ambassador to Japan and current Sen. Bill Hagerty, former director of national intelligence and former Rep. John Ratcliffe, and others.” Kroenig didn’t address why so many of Trump’s former national security officials, including his former vice president (Mike Pence), former secretary of defense (Mark Esper), former chief of staff (John Kelly), and former national security adviser (John Bolton) have attacked his fitness for office.

My colleague Charles Kupchan wrote in Foreign Affairs that Democrats should seek to understand rather than dismiss Trump’s isolationism. It can be fairly debated whether Trump is an isolationist, assuming that term means anything more than a critic of liberal internationalism. But Charlie is certainly correct that Democrats need to recognize that “an expansive liberal internationalism…is no longer sustainable at home or abroad.” The historical irony, of course, is that “the historical bouts of strategic overreach, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq,” that Charlie warns about were initiated by Republican and not Democratic presidents and ardently supported by many of the voters now flocking to Trump’s banner.

What the Polls Show

The Pew Research Center released a short report on important things to know about election polling. One lesson is that “compared with other elections in the past 20 years, polls have been less accurate when Donald Trump is on the ballot.” Pew says so-called shy Trump voters who are unwilling to be honest with pollsters isn’t the problem. The inaccuracy instead owes partly to the fact that Trump enjoys more support among voters who skip midterm elections. Because pollsters use behavior in midterm elections to determine who qualifies as “likely voters,” these missing voters skew the results. Another factor is that Trump voters may be less likely to participate in polls in the first place. If a group of voters is more likely to avoid talking to pollsters but still votes, then the poll will be less accurate.

Pew also released a detailed report on how Americans see Harris’s and Trump’s relative strengths and weaknesses. One finding is that a substantial gap exists between Harris and Trump supporters on what presidential actions are acceptable. Although majorities of both groups agree that presidents should use executive orders when they cannot get their policies through Congress, agreement stops there. Fifty-four percent of Trump supporters say it would be acceptable for a “future President Trump to order federal law enforcement officials to investigate Democratic political opponents.” Just 27 percent of Harris backers agree that it would be appropriate for a President Harris to do so. Likewise, 41 percent of Trump supporters see no problem with a future President Trump firing federal employees who are not personally loyal to him. Just 12 percent of Harris backers were comfortable with her acting likewise.

The Campaign Schedule

The first in-person absentee voting in the nation begins in Minnesota and South Dakota in one week (September 20, 2024).

Election Day is fifty-three days away (November 5, 2024).

Electors will meet in each state and the District of Columbia to cast their votes for president and vice president in ninety-one days (December 17, 2024).

The 119^th U.S. Congress will be sworn into office in 112 days (January 3, 2025).

The U.S. Congress will certify the results of the 2024 presidential election in 115 days (January 6, 2025).

Inauguration Day is 129 days away (January 20, 2025).

Shelby Sires assisted in the preparation of this post.