Who won Trump-Harris debate?

Photo: NewsNation

NewsNation’s Dan Abrams and Chris Stirewalt joined Chris Cuomo to discuss some of the hottest debate topics: Did the moderators favor one candidate? Did Harris and Trump accomplish what they set out to do?

Trump vs. Harris debate overview:

In the muted mic debate, the pair blamed each other for the nation’s economic issues, traded jabs about immigration policy and shared their differing viewpoints on abortion.

In closing statements, Harris harkened toward the future and promised to be a president for the people, while Trump used his two minutes to reiterate that he believes the Harris-Biden administration is “the worst” in U.S. history.

Cuomo pointed to Trump’s “witheringly negative view of this country,” with Abrams saying Trump grew “increasingly negative” as the night wore on.

Though it’s much less clear who came out on top, NewsNation’s analysts can agree on a few things.

Dan Abrams: Kamala Harris ‘definitely had a better night.’

Abrams and Cuomo agreed that Harris’ hopeful rhetoric is more likely to sway undecided voters.

Harris, Abrams said, “successfully triggered him” by calling him weak and pointing out that some of his closest advisers are no longer by his side.

Conservative commentator Scottie Nell Hughes and Nina Turner, the former national co-chair for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, also joined the panel to discuss their major takeaways from the debate. “Oh, she got in his head. She did,” Turner said. “She owned him tonight.”

“By her saying, ‘You’re weak,’ I mean he almost jumped out of his skin… He tried to keep his composure, but she was already in his head,” Turner added.

“He wouldn’t even look at her, which I think is a mistake on a human level,” Cuomo added.

Stirewalt echoed that analysis, saying ‘Trump could not resist her baiting.’

“My verdict is: She prepared, and he did not prepare,” Stirewalt said. “He famously doesn’t like to prepare. He famously doesn’t like to do his homework. And she did, and you could tell tonight.”

Stirewalt told Cuomo and Abrams that he felt as though the moderators went harder on Trump, a sentiment echoed by Republicans.

Cuomo asked Stirewalt to clarify his statement, asking: “Do you believe that they were helping Harris, or he requires more fact-checking because he is completely reckless with the truth on a regular basis more than anyone he’s ever on stage with?”

“A lot of Republicans tonight are going to take comfort from the fact that it was unfair, that it was rigged, that it was bad,” Stirewalt said.

“Trump still didn’t do what he had to do,” Abrams said.

Bill O’Reilly told NewsNation he doesn’t think anyone won the debate, citing Trump playing only to his base and Harris refusing to give specific answers to the moderators’ questions.

“Trump was foolish at times. He won the first half-hour of the debate, but then he descended as he always does,” O’Reilly said. “I don’t know why.”

Geraldo Rivera, however, thinks Harris was the clear winner because Trump was resorting to “middle school” tactics. “He lost his best chance to squash her candidacy and make her a mockery. He lost his best chance to be the favorite going forward,” Rivera added.

While Democrats and Republicans might believe their candidate came out on top, one thing is clear: It was a livelier debate than the late June event that led to President Joe Biden’s exit from the race.

The 90-minute debate could have a profound impact on the Nov. 5 election, with 30% of registered voters telling an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll the debate will help them decide how to cast their ballots.

The latest polling from the New York Times/Siena College revealed Trump leads Harris by just a point. Three other polls posted within the past week — RMG Research/Napolitan News National Survey (+2), Outward Intelligence survey (+4) and Emerson College Polling (+4) — all reflected Harris leading Trump.

Photo: WSJ

To say that Kamala Harris nailed it in Tuesday night’s debate is an understatement. She knocked it out of the park. She combined civility with firmness, stresses Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley.

This was Harris’s first presidential debate. It was Trump’s eighth – including his debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But Trump was worse than he has ever been. All he did was attack.

Trump claimed that the American economy under him was better than the economy under Biden and Harris, and that under Harris the economy would be ruined. In fact, under Trump, America lost almost 3m jobs. And Trump’s unforgivable failure to contain Covid as well as other advanced countries required massive government expenditures that fueled inflation.

Biden and Harris, by contrast, have presided over an explosion of job growth while inflation has been tamed.

On the issue of abortion, Trump claimed Democrats want to kill babies after they are born. When questioned about January 6, he charged that Biden and Harris were responsible for the investigations and indictments that targeted him.

Harris, compared to Trump, answered the questions asked of her – clearly, cogently, powerfully.

It wasn’t so much Trump’s shambolic responses that gave Harris the big win. It was her manner, in sharp contrast to his.

She set the tone by walking over to Trump at the start of the debate to shake his hand and introduce herself. He seemed flummoxed.

Throughout the next 90 minutes, she stayed in control. She was the adult in the room. She smiled at his brazen lies, and then scolded him about them. She was in command of her facts and arguments and refused to stoop to Trump’s belligerence or become rattled by it.

Trump interrupted, even though his mic was supposed to be muted – which is how he managed to get nine more minutes of talk than Harris. Regardless of how much time he had, he filled it with shouts, harangues and repeatedly bogus claims.

Harris’s most important challenge was to introduce herself to the American public as tough and competent. She did that superbly.

She also understood that the only way to deal with Trump’s attacks was to hit him back harder. In doing so, she showed a combination of ferocity and discipline.

Despite a month of favorable coverage, 28% of voters in the recent New York Times/Siena College poll said they still needed to learn more about Harris, compared with only 9% who said they needed to know more about Trump.

On Tuesday night they saw a leader.

Her second challenge was to separate herself from Biden while also taking appropriate credit for the Biden-Harris administration’s achievements. An overwhelming majority of voters say they want the next president to bring “major change”.

Harris did that. She showed herself as the agent of change. She spoke of her plans for helping small business and families. She talked about how she would stand up for a woman’s reproductive freedom. She was tough on foreign policy and explained the importance of Nato. She was clear and forceful about strengthening American democracy and the rule of law.

Harris spoke of a “new beginning” for America. What does this new beginning consist of? She didn’t have to talk about her youth, gender or ethnicity, because these attributes were obvious. It was her positive energy – in contrast to Trump’s overwhelming negativism – that drove home the point.

The “new beginning” is a new generation of leadership.

Trump tried to paint Harris as the candidate of the status quo. He failed.

Her third challenge was to goad Trump into exposing his out-of-control self. In this she also succeeded.

When she said Americans were ready to turn the page on the politics of the past and strive together for a better future, she didn’t need to do more than make the slightest gesture toward the ageing, raging fount of grievance standing on the other side of the stage.

Her third challenge was to goad Trump into exposing his out-of-control self. In this she also succeeded.

She rattled Trump to the point where he couldn’t contain his nastiness. He called her a “Marxist”, and accused her father of being one, too. “She’s been so bad,” he sneered. He called her “the worst vice-president in the history of the country”.

Trump’s closing statement (he won the coin toss to close last) was even darker. We would become a failed nation if she were elected president, he predicted. We already are on the way to becoming one, he said.

Harris won hands down, but what matters most is whether the few voters who before the debate were uncertain about how to vote now decide to support Harris over Trump. Most pundits thought Clinton had won her three debates with Trump.

With election day just eight weeks away and early voting beginning within days, what Americans tell one another about tonight’s debate will be determinative.

If one of Donald Trump’s goals during Tuesday’s debate was to show that Kamala Harris would be a weak world leader, he failed, writes POLITICO.

She managed, after all, to hold her own against him while navigating topics unusually tricky for a Biden administration official, such as the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the politically dicey Israel-Hamas war.

Foreign officials watching the Philadelphia faceoff weren’t expecting — and didn’t get — many policy specifics from either candidate. But many of those I spoke to said they wanted to see if Harris could stand up to a man who can be a bully, especially toward women, and rattle his political opponents.

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.

“Composed, authoritative, and presidential,” one European diplomat raved.

“She even managed to laugh at him,” a senior European official marveled.

Her ability to manage Trump offered assurance that she could navigate tough personal relationships. Given that international relations often come down to the nature of personal relations, this matters.

The main foreign affairs issues that came up were the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Afghanistan, including the deaths and chaos that accompanied the 2021 full U.S. military withdrawal from the latter.

Trump and Harris both called the other “weak” on just about every one of these fronts.

But Trump’s claims were more exaggerated. He alleged that Israel would cease to exist within two years if Harris becomes president and that he’d resolve the Russia-Ukraine war while still president-elect. Trump also tried to link border security and immigration, which are more traditionally viewed as domestic matters, in with his critiques of Harris on foreign policy.

The Republican didn’t directly answer when asked if he wanted Ukraine to win the war Russia launched against it. “I want the war to stop,” he said in an answer that will only invite more allegations that he’s too friendly to Russia, and Putin in particular.

In between throwing brutal glances at Trump, Harris appeared well-prepped for the moderators’ questions and the former president’s barbs.

“You’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me,” Harris said at one point.

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