She entered the set by walking towards him to shake his hand, which clearly took him by surprise. She then left him to stew in his bile for an hour and a half. For Kamala Harris, it was a matter of getting into the ring and nailing Donald Trump, as imperturbably as possible. Mission accomplished. Faced with an angry Trump, spouting an impressive amount of insults and enormities on all subjects, she remained focused, very “formatted” in her speech, certainly, but effective and pugnacious. She made the crucial demonstration of her “presidential worthiness”.
Generally speaking, these presidential debates are, for voters, mostly about impressions and personalities. They boil down to a few excerpts that the media replay ad nauseam, sometimes to a “viral moment” that makes or breaks a candidacy. His lost gaze and completely disjointed remarks destroyed Mr. Biden from the first minutes of his debate with Trump in June. Tuesday night’s was captivating from start to finish, highlighting, in both form and substance, the abysmal gulf between the two candidates — she imposing the idea that it was time to “turn the page” on the Trump era, he, full of hubris, constantly returning to the supposed perfection of his presidency.
One debate does not make an election, of course. In this ultra-polarized country, there would be less than 5% of voters left to convince. So what impact will this moment of campaigning have on the undecided?
Donald Trump’s goal was to reduce the candidacy of “Comrade Kamala” to an extension of the mandate of the unpopular and tired Joe Biden. It failed. He more or less followed his opponent on the sensitive issue of inflation and purchasing power and he did not exploit the suspicions of Democratic cover-ups of Biden’s state of health, drifting obsessively into anti-immigrant diatribes. In wanting to embody change and renewal without being able to erase the baggage she carries as vice president, Ms. Harris nevertheless faced — and still faces — a major challenge. The polls have measured its difficulty: the one, published last Sunday, of New York Times / Siena College, wants 61% of voters to expect “major change” from the next president, and an identical proportion of them believe that Trump is the one who promises it (compared to 40% for Ms. Harris).
Another recent poll shows the wall the Democratic candidate is hitting: the Pew Research Institute poll, which found that on the economy, a central issue in the presidential campaign, Trump is more credible than Harris (55% to 45%). The fact is that many voters are nostalgic for the pre-pandemic years of Trump’s presidency, when their quality of life improved largely because of the measures implemented under Obama to combat the Great Recession of 2007-2008. Voters everywhere have, by definition, short and selective memories. What these polls are finding is no less troubling: that Trump, this former president with a criminal conviction who still refuses to acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 presidential election—something Harris has not failed to point out—embodies this desire for change is a tragic testament to Americans’ loss of trust in their institutions and their political class. It is up to Democrats to restore that trust.
“When you can’t change the world, you have to change the scenery,” writes Daniel Pennac in The Little Prose Merchant. On Tuesday night, Americans were shopping for their new decor, just as Canadians will soon be shopping for theirs. But it is hard to believe that real change can occur in such a lack of political and social dialogue and in such a context of trivialization of violence — both physical and verbal.
Are the undecided, key to the presidential election on November 5, less so after the Harris-Trump debate on Tuesday evening? Did Ms. Harris (now armed with the support of Taylor Swift!) succeed in shifting their voting intentions in her favor? This is a crucial question given the state of dysfunction of the American electoral system. In 2020, some 43,000 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — that is, 0.03% of the votes recorded nationally — allowed Biden to win. In 2016, it was the combination of around 80,000 votes in a few key states that gave victory to the sinister Trump. The democratic future of the United States hangs by a thread.