The Trump-Harris presidential debate failed the voters

The first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump was a missed opportunity for both candidates and, as such, a disappointment for the American voters.

Trump had three points he needed to land against Kamala Harris: that voters cannot trust her because she is constantly changing her policy positions without a satisfactory explanation; that she covered up President Joe Biden’s cognitive deficiencies from the American people and then participated in a coup to take him out when it was politically convenient for her, and that she has had three and a half years to do the things she claims she will do on “Day One” as president.

Trump pointed out a few times that she had changed her position on fracking and defunding the police, but could have more successfully threaded the needle on what that means for her campaign. Why did she change those positions? Did she have a legitimate political transformation? Or was it, as Senator Bernie Sanders said, that she knew she needed to do it to win the election? If we believe it’s the latter, make the case that she will govern as the radical she presented herself as in 2019.

On point two, Trump brought up that Biden was forced out in a coup and noted Harris’s involvement, but did not get to the kill shot: Harris claimed repeatedly on air both before and after the June debate that Biden was perfectly well. How does she explain that which is so contrary to what everyone saw on that debate stage?

Finally, Trump waited until his closing answer to hit Harris for not doing now what she promises to do after winning the presidency. It was one of his most effective moments and should have been used earlier and more often.

Harris, meanwhile, needed to introduce herself to the American people during this debate. She successfully disarmed Trump multiple times, such as when she pivoted from easily her worst issue — immigration — by baiting Trump to talk about his crowd sizes.

But her performance was ultimately a disservice to voters who wanted to know more about her policy positions and were left with a whole lot of platitudes and no explanation as to her shifting policy stances over the past four years. How many times can you say “opportunity economy” while dodging on whether the economy is better now than it was four years ago?

The worst of the debate, though, came from the abysmal and uneven job undertaken by the ABC moderators. While Trump only has himself to blame for some of his meandering and off-topic answers when Harris had her belly exposed, it’s tough to be in a debate against three challengers. David Muir and Linsey Davis consistently “fact-checked” Trump after his responses — including on his reference to former Virginia governor Ralph Northam saying that doctors and parents could have a “conversation” about letting a baby die after an unsuccessful abortion — and then punted to Harris to finish the job. They did not fact check Harris once on the plenty of false statements she made, such as insinuating Trump did not condemn neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, claiming Trump supports abortion bans and banning IVF, alleging police officers died on January 6, that Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if Biden won reelection and that his agenda is Project 2025.

Ultimately, it’s better to err on the side of letting the debaters “fact-check” one another. The job of any good debater is to correct your opponent when they get things wrong. But if moderators are going to step in, they need to be willing to do it fairly on both sides. That sadly did not come even close to happening tonight.

Harris probably had more to lose tonight with a bad debate, and she did fine. But her team immediately came out proposing a second debate, which means they are either overconfident and think they can put a final nail in Trump’s coffin or they think Harris didn’t do enough to pull out a clear victory. Either way, it’s a risky proposal. Trump is known to perform better in his second-round debates, and it’s unlikely he’d agree again to an obviously biased-against-him mainstream news network like ABC. Fox News, of course, has already offered to host the next match-up.