The Debate Is Over. Now What?
Kamala Harris won the debate, but does that mean she's winning the race?
Democrats everywhere breathed a sigh of relief on Tuesday night as it became clear, after a bit of nerves at the beginning, that Vice President Kamala Harris was on her game and was masterfully knocking Donald Trump off his.
Through a combination of disciplined messaging about her vision of the future and the need to turn the page on the Trump years, alongside her sustained needling of Trump where she baited him into outbursts and tirades, Harris accomplished all she set out to do and then some.
But will the debate really move public opinion? There’s a common refrain and belief that “debates don’t matter.” Democrats said that after Biden’s unfortunate performance in the first debate, only to see the cascade effect of that result in his withdrawal from the race. Now the right is busily making the same claim.
“Debates don’t matter” is a position that political operatives often take when their candidate has clearly lost.
But 2024 isn’t an ordinary election, and there’s a case to be made that this debate matters as much as the Biden/Trump one did.
In today’s piece, I’ll discuss what makes this election, and therefore this debate, fundamentally different from others. I’ll also discuss what we have seen so far from the focus groups and early indicators following the debate, including how the parties’ respective bases have responded in terms of new voter registrations and dollar donations.
The 2024 election is unique. And debates do matter.
This election was already unique for having one of the longest campaign seasons in recent history. When the contest was between Biden and Trump, the public remained uninterested, fatigued, and unhappily resigned to more of the same from two elderly men they already knew fairly well.
No one expected that a single debate would change the course of the campaign so dramatically. But we all know what happened: Biden’s poor performance raised such concerns about his age and ability to take on Trump that on July 21, with just a few months to go before Election Day, he dropped out, endorsing Kamala Harris who then quickly sewed up the nomination.
In short, we already have one example where a single debate in fact mattered a great deal in 2024. But what about the one that just took place between Harris and Trump?
That one matters, too. We haven’t seen a contest this close—and this abbreviated—in recent history. The way in which Harris rose and gained quickly in both popularity and recognition, catching Trump off guard and deeply wishing he were still battling a far older and electorally weaker Biden, made 2024 seem more like a “snap” election of the kind held in Europe. There was little time to campaign, raise money and organize. And the public doesn’t have very much time to assess the two candidates, especially side by side.
Indeed, a sizable 28 percent of voters in the recent New York Times/Siena College poll responded that they needed to learn more about Harris. (Understandably, only 9 percent said they needed to know more about Trump.) That raised the stakes of the debate considerably, as it was a real chance for those still on the fence to get to know Harris. Whether that would be on her terms or Trump’s was still unknown until Tuesday. The Harris campaign is pleased that this group saw her at her best.
Moreover, the biggest wild card in this election has been the rather large group of “double haters”—voters who didn’t like either Biden or Trump. Ever since Harris won the Democratic nomination, this group has broken strongly for Harris, giving her a strong lift in the polls in areas where Biden was frustratingly weak: younger voters and minority voters. In many ways that is not surprising, because a group that didn’t like either candidate would be likely to swing favorably toward any new candidate.
Still, a good number of the remaining double haters have yet to make up their minds, largely because they are lower propensity and lower information voters who often decide which way to vote, if they do at all, in the final slog of a campaign.
That fact also upped the stakes for this debate, especially since no other debates have yet been agreed to. Tuesday could well be the one and only time the candidates will clash in public.
There were also a lot of people watching this debate compared to the other big one this year. According to Nielsen, the debate drew 67.1 million viewers, making it the most-watched event so far in the 2024 presidential campaign. That number is comparable to the number who saw the second Clinton/Trump debate in 2016.
And while it’s difficult to know for certain whether Harris will benefit long term from her stellar performance, there are already some clues that she might.
Polling, post-debate
CNN has been conducting post-debate polls for every presidential debate. Those surveyed this time were split 50/50 before the debate about who would prevail, but afterward, it was clear from the poll results that they had shifted substantially to Harris. She won the debate 63/37.
To put this into some context, her margin of victory here was historically large, per reporting by the Washington Post. It rivaled how Trump fared against Biden in the same poll after the June debate (67/33). The margin was comparable to Biden’s first debate against Trump in 2020, when Trump made his infamous “stand back and stand by” comment (60/28), and was also comparable to Hillary Clinton’s win over Trump in the first debate in 2016 (62/27).
Notably, Harris’s 63 percent score on her debate is the highest ever for a Democratic candidate, according to Democratic pollster and strategist Matt McDermott.
There have been a handful of national polls taken post-debate, and I want to focus on two of the higher quality ones. The first is from Reuters/Ipsos. It showed that Harris is now leading Trump by five points nationally. That’s up one point from before the debate. Respondents to that poll also gave her the debate win by a 29-point margin, 53 to 24 percent.
The second is from Morning Consult, which also shows Harris leading Trump by five points, 50 to 45 percent. That is the largest lead she has ever had with this poll and the first she has reached the critical 50 point mark this election cycle. It is an increase from the 49 to 46 percent she had in the same poll last week, with Trump dropping back a point.
Undecideds watching the debate moved toward Harris
Who won or lost the debate and by how much isn’t really that important and can fade quickly from the headlines. That’s why it’s useful to gauge reactions by undecided voters who watched the debate as part of focus groups.
Before I dive into these, a caveat and clarification about undecideds or swing voters. Who are these folks who still haven’t made up their minds? Do such people really exist, after all we’ve seen from Trump?
The New York Times interviewed surrogates from the Harris campaign, who spoke about reaching these voters and what they’re looking for:
Senator Laphonza Butler of California, a top Harris ally, said that some wavering voters could not “imagine beyond their traditional experience at this level of politics.”
“‘I need to know more’ is also an expression of some fear and hesitancy about something they’ve never seen before,” Ms. Butler said. “It’s the first time that a Black woman, a woman that has had the life journey that the vice president has had, has been in a position to run for the highest office in the land. And rather than to say, ‘I’m a little hesitant,’ maybe a better way, a more thoughtful way to express that, is: ‘I might need to know more. I don’t know enough.’”
Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark, who regularly conducts focus groups among undecided and swing voters, writes that a common hesitation among such voters is how a woman would handle bullies, such as Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, on the international stage:
“Some countries do not respect women,” Nicole, a swing voter from Arizona, said during a group in July. “And so, to have a female running the United States—I’m all for females, just not as a president. Sorry, ladies.”
Voters don’t have this concern about Trump, a physically large man who insults his enemies in the most hostile terms possible.
Susan, a two-time Trump voter from Florida, described Trump’s style this way last month: “He’s just a big bully. The biggest bully on the playground. And if you don’t do it his way, you’re going to pay for it.”
The fact that Harris is a woman of color therefore may account for much of the hesitancy from swing voters. To clear the plausibility bar, such candidates often have to affirmatively prove that they have what it takes, and they aren’t given a presumptive passing score like white male candidates often get.
I should also add that I’m not very keen on the focus groups put together by the cable networks for television ratings purposes. There is a high incentive for partisans to try and infiltrate these groups and throw the results off. Recently, the MeidasTouch Network reported that one of CNN’s focus group participants was a die-hard MAGA whom the network had failed to vet.
That said, there are far more reputable focus group organizers, and what they found tells a consistent narrative. Longwell has been conducting focus group research for years and is considered one of the leading experts on how disaffected or non-committed voters are feeling and acting.
Within her focus group of nine swing voters, polled just after the debate, Longwell reported,
7 feel worse about Trump, 2 feel no change after the debate
8 feel better about Harris, 1 feels no change after the debate
“Clean sweep for Harris with these voters. Three had previously been leaning RFK over Harris back in June when we talked to them,” Longwell reported. Now they are all “voting for her.”
The question on most of these voters’ minds was whether Harris could stand up to a bully like Trump and pass that presidential plausibility test, meaning could they really see her in the Oval Office. After watching her up against Trump, Longwell’s group thought she could. Moreover, Harris was able to define herself well enough for them to make up their minds:
Harris’s slogan, “For the people,” puts voters—not the candidate’s identity—at the center of things. And when pressed on the debate stage, instead of raising the salience of race and gender, she said, “We don’t want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us.”
Voters seem to appreciate this attitude. After all, they are aware that Harris would be the first woman president. What they want to know is what she stands for.
Carol, a Pennsylvania swing voter, put it this way in July: “I’m fine that she’s Black. I'm fine that she’s a woman. But is she the best person for this job?”
The nine-person focus group my team spoke with this morning weighed in on Carol’s question. We asked these voters how they would describe Harris’s performance. The most common response: “presidential.”
The Washington Post also organized a focus group of undecided voters, and the results weighed heavily in Harris’s favor as well. Of the 25 swing voters surveyed, 23 believed Harris performed better, while 2 went for Trump.
Harris also appeared to solidify support from those who were leaning her way, with many now saying they “definitely” are for Harris. Meanwhile, Trump lost some of those who had been leaning his way. There were no “definitely Trump” voters in the group.
The number of people in these focus groups is small, so minor variations can have big percentage effects. But the trend in both focus groups is unmistakable. Following the debate, Harris is starting to bake in her support while Trump is losing ground.
New voter registrations and the money game
Other indications of support and enthusiasm are new voter registrations and small dollar donations. Democrats have been trouncing Republicans on both counts recently, and that trend continued both during and after the debate.
One way to gauge voter registration interest is to track Google searches for it. Something very interesting happened during the debate. When Trump was asked whether he regretted anything about his actions around January 6, and he gave a noncommittal answer before reiterating his election lies, there was a spike in Google searches for how to register. Here is CNN’s reporting on that interesting phenomenon:
That spike actually exceeded the later rise resulting from pop star Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. (Following her post on Instagram, which linked to the vote.gov website, the site saw over 337,000 new visits as of 2 pm the next day.)
The debate night also saw a sharp spike in online donations. Following the debate and through the next day, ActBlue reported a whopping $77 million in new donations for the Harris campaign and the Democrats.
I wasn’t able to find figures for how much Trump raised, but I did note that his Trump Media stock tanked following his poor debate performance:
That’s a $500 million paper loss for Trump right there, and not exactly a vote of confidence for the ex-president’s chances.
But will it matter?
With the post-debate polls, the focus groups, and soft data around donations and new voter registrations all pointing toward a Harris advantage, will this result in a lasting bump for Harris?
Some caveats are in order.
New voters won’t show up in any polling between now and the election, as most pollsters use existing voter rolls to reach out for their surveys. Most of the polling we will see over the next two months will undercount these new voters, who are breaking for the Democrats by a large margin.
Further, polling can be off by several points one way or the other. Even polling averages can be plagued by a systemic miss, just as we saw in 2016 and 2020, when MAGA GOP voters were undercounted, and 2022 when they were overweighted.
On the other hand, at least one Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, who organizes and speaks frequently to swing voters, shocked viewers by predicting that Trump performed so badly and at such a critical moment that he would go on to lose the election. That has got to worry the Trump campaign.
There are a bit less than eight weeks remaining before Election Day, and Harris has the wind at her back. But a lot can happen in 50+ days, and Trump will have several more chances to regain his footing. As the Harris campaign stated in a fundraising email, “Debates don’t win elections.”
Only votes do.
Since publication, a Morning Consult post-debate poll also shows Harris with a 5 point national lead over Trump, reaching the 50 percent mark at 50 to 45 percent for the first time this election cycle. That is an increase in her lead of two points, from 49 to 46 a week earlier in the same poll.
I'm sick to death of "undecideds". In a contest this stark, you have to live in a bubble to not have made a decision. It's literally between fascism and democracy. What I took from the description of these people in the focus groups is they're either racist, sexist, or both. Polling wouldn't be this close if we abolished the Electoral College. It's way past time. As far as reporting on the debate goes, our media continues to fail us. I'm sick of every election since Obama being so scary. The Republican party has shown us for a long time what they stand for and it's not us. My other big worry is the Republican never trumpers. They may vote for Kamala, but I'll bet good money they vote Republican in every other race, hoping to keep the House and/or flip the Senate. They could stall her agenda for her whole term. We have to vote for every Democrat on the ballot in numbers so big, that we outweigh their sabotage. I can wait for this to be over. I'm exhausted.