“Eat less kittens, vote Republican”

“He who gets angry loses.” I love this popular saying, and it is probably the best way to describe the results of the “clash,” or rather, presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Former President Trump got angry and lost… but he only lost the debate. He didn’t necessarily lose the election. And while Vice President Harris used the skills she learned as a prosecutor in California — throwing comments at Trump like bait and he took the bait, making him angrier and stumbling harder — and won the debate — in effect, she “rolled” Trump — she won’t necessarily win the election.

With 55 days to go until the US presidential election, polls indicate that the race is virtually tied, although some pollsters believe that Trump is currently ahead, particularly in the so-called swing states. For this reason, the vice president not only needed to win the debate, she urgently needed to hit several home runs. The question is: was it enough?

You have to admire Harris’s debate strategy. It was successful because it exposed Trump as resentful, ignorant and weak. Her attacks on Trump included inviting the audience to go to the Republican’s rallies to watch his followers abandon him because they are bored with his crazy ideas. She also reminded Trump that more than 200 former Republican officials, including his Secretary of Defense, his National Security Adviser and former Vice President Dick Cheney, are not going to support him and will vote for her. The vice president rubbed in his face how Goldman Sachs claimed that Trump’s plans would worsen the economy: economists at Wharton University (of which Trump is an alumnus) claimed that under him the deficit would explode and 16 Nobel Prize winners expressed their concern that the former president’s policies could increase inflation and induce a recession in the United States.

Kamala repeated several times how world leaders laugh at Donald Trump and that Vladimir Putin “would eat him for lunch—“I would eat him for lunch”— because of his weakness in the face of autocrats who manipulated him with flattery and favors.

Access to legal abortion was the issue that demonstrated Harris’ brilliant debate strategy. She used heartbreaking examples of women and girls to underscore the impact of the repeal of Roe v. Wade —which established that women had a constitutional right to a legal abortion—thanks to three Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump himself. But what shattered it was when Harris claimed that neither Trump nor the government has the right to tell a woman what to do with her body.

The former president insisted that he did not lose the 2024 election, again questioning what happened during the Capitol takeover on January 6, 2021. Trump insisted that he did not play a central role in the insurrection. This allowed the vice president to remind voters that he not only faced impeachment for his role in the attack, but that he also faces criminal prosecution for it.

In response to these assertions, the counterattack of the disgruntled and sometimes confused former president focused on two aspects: the weakness of the economy that the current administration is inheriting and the dangers that he believes represent the 15 million illegal immigrants who have entered the United States in recent years. Throughout the debate, these two themes filtered into Trump’s responses.

And while Democrats will surely feel triumphant over Harris’s clear thrashing, it is a mistake to assume that the debate will change the course of the election. Because one thing the vice president was unable to provide during the hour and a half that it lasted was a firm and credible answer to the question: what strategy does she propose to control the flow of immigrants? And while the way Trump refers to migrants and his strategy of pursuing, detaining and deporting millions of people who are in the country illegally is horrifying, it is also important to recognize the popularity of these proposals and how the American perception of illegal immigration has changed: a greater number believe that “criminal immigration” has increased and that Democrats are allowing so many migrants to enter so that they will vote for them.

It’s hard to shake off that perception of the danger migrants pose to the United States, especially since one of the most ridiculous topics of the night was Trump’s claims that Haitian migrants were “eating” pets—dogs and cats—in the city of Springfield, Ohio. Although everything indicates that this information is fake news, continues to be one of the most talked about topics on social media thanks to memes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Senator Ted Cruz. In the swing state of Arizona, the witty Republican Party bought a billboardan advertisement, with images of kittens, that says “eat less kittens, vote Republican.”

Polls will have to be closely followed, especially among undecided voters and independents in key states, to understand the impact of the debate. Will the smiling Harris be able to take off in the polls, supported at the last minute by singer Taylor Swift? Or will the threat of mass deportation of alleged “criminal” migrant kitten-eating voters be what moves them? There are 55 days left.