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SALT LAKE CITY — Supporters of both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump likely view their preferred candidate as the winner of Tuesday's presidential debate as Trump repeatedly sought to tie his opponent to the Biden administration's handling of the border and the economy and Harris appeared to be successful in getting under Trump's skin.
Unlike the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden — in which concerns about the president's age were accentuated by his stumbling performance — both candidates avoided a major blunder that could have put them on their back foot heading into the final weeks of the campaign, according to University of Utah political science professor Matthew Burbank.
"I don't think there was anything for either candidate that you would look at and say, 'Oh, that's a huge problem,'" he told KSL.com on Tuesday evening. "I think that for both of them, they're going to feel like they did what they wanted to do."
For Harris, who entered the campaign following Biden's withdrawal from the Democratic ticket, Tuesday night was the best — and possibly last — chance to show voters that she can go toe-to-toe with former President Trump on the debate stage. While the candidates were asked a broad array of policy questions, many viewers use debates as a chance to see each stand up to the pressures of a live, national audience and, in that case, Burbank believes Harris acquitted herself well.
"My sense was that Harris did what she needed to do, in the sense that she stood up to all the attacks. She didn't always answer the question that was asked, but she always had a response," he said. "It was hitting the points that she wanted to hit."
That included hammering Trump for appointing three of the conservative Supreme Court justices who ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade, and several attempts to bait the former president into tangential asides — including one in which Trump falsely claimed Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating the pet cats and dogs of residents.
"The government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body," Harris said when the issue of reproductive rights came up.
"I think it was indeed a strategy" to get under Trump's skin, Burbank said. "And essentially what happened, I think, with just about all of those that I can recall is that Donald Trump reacted in the way you would expect him to. The difficulty for him is this is not a rally. It's not a place where he just gets to say whatever he wants to say, and everybody's going to be happy with that. ... And the problem for the Trump campaign was that this sort of fit exactly into the narrative I think that Harris was trying to get across, which is, 'I've got a plan for moving forward. The former president is somebody who wants to talk about what happened in the past.'"
Even many not supporting Harris admit she did well, including Republican Utah state Sen. Todd Weiler, who tweeted: "Kamala Harris has held her own and exceeded expectations tonight."
Trump entered the contest with a clear focus on turning the conversation towards the Biden administration's record on the economy and immigration — something he came back to often.
"They've had three and a half years to fix the border," he said, of Harris' time as vice president. "They've had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn't she done it?"
Trump refused to back away from previously unpopular positions with swing voters, when he repeated and doubled down on false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and downplayed the violence during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — which was carried out by some of his supporters who believed his claims about the election.
"For his supporters, that's fine. They've heard this before and they're not going to object to it," Burbank said. "In fact, many of them are very supportive of it. But I think in terms of winning over those people who may be undecided, I think that discussion is probably not going to help him as a candidate."
Many Trump supporters were quick to criticize David Muir and Linsey Davis, journalists who moderated the debate on ABC. After the debate, Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity the contest felt like three against one.
"I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE," he posted on Truth Social.
"As a debate moderator, @DonaldJTrumpJr would be more fair to Kamala than ABC has been to Trump," Utah Sen. Mike Lee wrote on X, tagging Trump's oldest son.
At the end of the day, the 2024 presidential election is on track to come down to several thousand voters in a handful of swing states, thanks to the polarized and calcified electorate, many of whom have deeply held opinions — positive or negative — of the former president.
"Both campaigns are going to be reasonably happy with how their candidates performed," Burbank said, reflecting on the evening. "But as a result of that, I don't think we will see a whole lot of change in public opinion, or anything else coming out of this debate. I just don't think there's anything there that people will look at and say, 'I would have voted for Harris but she said that,' or, 'I supported Trump, but now I can't.' I don't think there were any of those kinds of moments in that debate."
