Mercedes Gallego
Special Envoy. Philadelphia
Wednesday, September 11, 2024, 9:36 p.m.
More than 65 million Americans watched the historic debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris live on Tuesday night – early Wednesday morning in Spain – according to preliminary data from audience analyst Michael Mulvihill, who attributes it a 28% increase over the Trump/Biden debate in June, but of those millions only a few hundred thousand matter: the undecided voters in seven swing states that will decide the elections.
Critics agree that the vice president dominated the first face-off between the two candidates who will vie for the presidency on November 5, but surveys by different media outlets reveal that she failed to convince many of those she needs to distance herself from Trump. Even among those who credit her with the victory, there are few whom she has convinced to vote for her.
They are not scientific samples, because official polls will take days or weeks to be carried out, but they reveal a worrying trend: the disconnection between the political scientists who analyse the campaign from their offices and the voice of the street. This gap already produced a tremendous setback in the 2016 elections, when the polls overwhelmingly gave victory to Hillary Clinton, but it was Donald Trump who won. Since then, the main media have tried to distance themselves from the screens and centres of power to mingle with ordinary citizens before trying to portray their voting intention.
Of the ten polled by Reuters, six opted for Donald Trump at the end of Tuesday’s historic debate, in which the vice president put him on the ropes. Harris only won the vote of three. In another similar sample from CNN, one of the undecided voters who was convinced to vote for Trump, despite his stridency and nonsense, explained it this way: “I think it’s important to remember that we’re voting for the leader of our country and who’s going to make it better, not for someone you’d want to have at your wedding. We have the incredible privilege of choosing between two candidates who have already been in government and, when it comes down to it, the truth is, my life was better with Trump in the White House. The economy was more buoyant, inflation was lower and things were better in general, whereas with Kamala’s administration things have not been so fantastic. She says she is capable of fixing the problems that have been created during her vice presidency, but I don’t know if I can afford that risk.”
Beyond the viral cuts of cats and dogs eating immigrants, according to the many far-right hoaxes that Trump echoed in the debate, what the undecided wanted to know was what each one is going to do to improve their lives. The debate was full of mocking smiles from Harris, who irritated her rival, setting traps for his ego with the size of the audiences, for example, but was short on concrete details about his economic program.
“Take a look at his plan: He copied Biden’s, and it’s four pages long. He has no plan,” Trump attacked her. All of this forced the vice president to remind him of two things: “I’m not Biden, I think you’re wrong,” she cut in one of those decisive responses that impressed critics, and “you’re not running against Biden, you’re running against me.” The undecided who seek the hope of a better quality of life with a change of government do not see the difference clearly. The vice president owes loyalty to “her boss,” as Trump called him, for having chosen her as the first woman of color for the position and having made her his political heir, which gives her the opportunity to make history again.
Faithful to Biden
That is why he did not distance himself from his mentor even on such delicate issues as the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, a decision that he staunchly defended and says he supported at the time. “Four presidents said they would do it and it was Joe Biden who did it,” he defended him. “Thanks to him, taxpayers are not paying three hundred million a day for that war and today there is no active soldier stationed in any war zone in the world in conflict.”
This loyalty forces him to also defend the economic agenda for having brought the country out of the pandemic without falling into a recession, but which is resented by those who suffer with the shopping basket at the supermarket, the electricity bill or the mortgage.
In this sense, the “huge mistake” that critics attribute to Trump for not having changed his narrative in the face of the new candidate he is facing may be a success. His Achilles heel in the debate was not having prepared his ego to resist the provocations of Harris, who came out to the arena ready to dismantle his presidential ways.
Faced with the mocking smile with which Harris finished her exam, Trump had no choice but to resort to what he believes to be his best weapon: himself. He appeared by surprise in the press room, located almost a kilometer from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where the debate was held, creating a spectacular stir in the so-called ‘spin room’, where the heavyweights of the campaigns go to sell the victory of their candidate to the press, but not the candidates themselves. Robert F Kennedy Jr, Marco Rubio, Lara Trump… None of them could monopolize as many cameras as Trump, even if the questions were not exactly to his liking. “Did you lose the debate when you started talking about immigrants eating dogs?” the journalists wanted to know. “It was the best debate of my life,” he answered. “We are receiving a lot of good polls in which we have won by 90%, 60%, 72%… And she has done so badly that now she wants another debate, because she has been shaken,” he concluded in his parallel reality. It remains to be seen whether he will accept the rematch that the Harris campaign has proposed.
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