Most professional analyses of the September 10 presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump indicate that Harris “won” the debate. But does that mean that Harris “won over” enough voters to secure victory in November? Good question, because CNN held a snap poll following the debate, and the takeaways are surprising, to say the least.
That poll was conducted on September 10 and involved 605 registered voters who had watched the debate.
“She Tore Out Your Heart”. Likely the most emblematic — and graphic —take on the debate from the left was offered by Stephen Colbert, host of the CBS “Late Show”.
In response to Trump’s claims Harris only wants a second debate because she “lost” the first one, “very badly”, Colbert opined: “Counterpoint: She tore out your heart, showed it to you while it was still beating, and then ate it on national television, and now she would like seconds”.
Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClear Politics, offered a slightly different take in a September 12 article headlined “Did Harris Really Get the Debate She Needed?”
Trende began by admitting: “Trump was defensive, erratic, and made claims that either confused facts or were simply at odds with them. Harris, on the other hand, was confident and prosecuted the case against Trump with precision”.
He then, however, continued:
There’s a difference between what a candidate or a group wants and what it needs. What Harris and her supporters seemingly wanted was a technically adept evisceration of Trump. This echoes the desires of the highly educated moderate-to-liberal class of voters — which includes a lot of journalists — that most desperately wants Trump to be defeated. Harris delivered for them in spades. It’s no surprise that this class is ecstatic.
. . .
Yet interview after interview shows that almost everyone is keenly aware of Trump’s shortcomings.
. . .
In short: Effectively pantsing Trump may have been cathartic, but it probably didn’t move the ball. The man has been running around on the national stage in his skivvies for nine years now.
What Harris needed, according to Trende, was an opportunity to flesh out her positions, perfect her “stump speech”, and create “an image of herself that provides a foundation for the fall campaign”.
As per Trende:
Harris got none of that. The result is that even people who have followed the campaign closely know only a few things about her from a policy perspective: She’s pro-choice, she’s a former prosecutor, she once held a raft of policy positions that were pretty far to the left but that she may-or-may-not still hold, and she isn’t Donald Trump.
“The Debate, Immigration, and the ‘Turn-Out’ Election of 2024”. As I noted on September 11, Trump entered the debate with an edge over Harris on two of the three issues most important to likely voters according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll: the economy and immigration (the third is abortion, where Harris holds a clear advantage).
That poll revealed Harris trailed Trump among likely voters on the question of which candidate could better handle the economy by 13 points (42 percent to 55 percent for Trump), and that Trump had a 10-point edge when it came to handling immigration, with 53 percent favoring Trump compared to 43 percent of likely voters opting for the vice president to do that job.
That’s why, I suggested, Trump returned to immigration repeatedly during the debate, especially on questions seeming to have little to do with the subject. The problem for Harris is that, abortion aside, immigration now touches most every other major issue, from crime to local budgets and national security.
The CNN Post-Debate Poll. How did Trump’s strategy work out? That brings me to the CNN poll.
First, registered voters polled by CNN clearly believed that Harris had “won” the debate: 63 percent of those surveyed believed she did a better job during the verbal scrum, whereas 37 percent gave Trump the “W”.
Regardless, the post-debate CNN poll revealed that Trump still has a solid lead over Harris on the issue of immigration: 56 percent of voters preferred his handling of the subject, compared to a third — 33 percent — who would rather have Harris do that job.
That’s a 23-point edge in favor of the former president on the third-leading issue to voters.
CNN hadn’t previously polled Harris-vs.-Trump on immigration, but in an earlier poll conducted after the June 27 debate between President Biden and Trump, 27 percent of respondents favored Biden’s handling of immigration compared to 55 percent who believed Trump would be a better fit on the issue.
That was a 28-point edge for Trump, though it should be noted that in the June poll, 14 percent of respondents didn’t want either Biden or Trump handling immigration; in the September post-debate poll, just 6 percent of voters held the same sentiment.
The takeaway is that Harris likely picked up support from voters ambivalent about which party’s candidate would better handle immigration back in June, but so did Trump — albeit by a smaller margin.
Trump received an equal amount of support from both men and women on immigration in that post-debate poll (56 percent of each prefer him on the issue), but “people of color” clearly favor Harris’ handling of immigration to Trump’s, by a 47 percent to 37 percent margin (10 points in the vice president’s favor).
Trump’s edge over Harris on immigration, however, is most pronounced among white voters, 64 percent of whom prefer the former president to handle the issue compared to 28 percent who opt for the current vice president to do the job (a 36-point margin).
When it comes to the economy, the results are more shocking: In the post-debate poll, 55 percent of voters favored Trump’s handling of jobs and financial issues while 35 percent want Harris to be in charge of those subjects.
That’s a 20-point edge, but more importantly it shows Harris has lost two points on the economy while Trump has gained two points since a CNN poll conducted just days earlier.
In that poll, 37 percent of respondents believed that Harris would do a better job on the economy compared to 53 percent who thought Trump would — more or less proving Trende’s point.
Harris’s Working-Class Problem. You’ll note that while Trump has an edge over Harris on immigration and the economy in both the New York Times/Siena poll and in the CNN post-debate poll, that edge is much bigger in the latter than in the former.
That’s because CNN polled registered voters generally, while the Times/Siena poll only reported results from “likely voters”.
White college-educated voters in the Times/Siena poll were much more likely to vote (72 percent said they were “almost certain” to cast ballots) than whites with no college (56 percent almost certain to vote), non-whites who had graduated college (again, 56 percent almost certain to vote), and non-whites with no college (46 percent of whom are almost certain to vote).
Among non-college graduates overall, Trump has a 37-point edge over Harris in the CNN post-debate poll on the question of which one could better handle immigration (64 percent to 27 percent), a gap that grows to 55-points among whites with no college (74 percent to just 19 percent).
That’s much bigger than Trump’s advantage over Harris on the economy among non-college graduates generally (29 points) and among white non-college graduates in particular (48 points).
By contrast, the two are tied in the post-debate poll among college graduates when it comes to handling the economy (44 percent for each) and Trump holds just a slim one-point lead among this demographic on immigration (44 to 43 percent).
In a September 12 article headlined “Harris’s Working-Class Problem”, Democratic pundit Ruy Teixeira argued that “working class support ... remains a serious weak spot” for both his party and its presidential candidate.
He explains:
College-educated America may be delighted with candidate Harris but working-class America clearly is not. And there are a lot more working-class than college-educated Americans. Remember that they will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths).
The key word there is “eligible voters”. Again, working-class voters weren’t as likely to be heading to the polls in November as their fellow citizens with college degrees, according to the Times/Siena poll, so Harris’s disadvantage among the working class will be less pronounced if large numbers of them just stay home.
Trump didn’t offer many particulars about what he’d do about immigration and the border, though that likely wasn’t too important given most voters know what he did when he was in office. But he was clear about the impact the Biden-Harris administration has had on those issues (often in colorful terms).
That pitch was similar to his rather sweeping and vague 2016 campaign promise to “build the wall”. Few voters — college-educated and not — know what CHNV parole or the CBP One port interview scheme is, or what impact foreign students have on our national security, but they hear news reports about what Trump termed “migrant crime”, and probably have their concerns.
In a Box. That puts Harris and Democrats generally in a box. It would likely behoove the vice president to distinguish her immigration policies from the Biden-Harris administration’s (and from some of her earlier, more outré immigration positions), but as I’ve explained in the past, the more anyone discusses immigration these days, the more important an issue it becomes to voters — and it’s not one that will likely ever favor Harris.
Given how little substance came out of the September 10 debate, expect the October 1 face-off between the vice-presidential candidates — Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to garner more attention than such debates have received in the past.
That debate will be held by CBS News, which next to Fox News is likely the most immigration-heavy major media outlet. If asked about the subject, Walz will likely hammer Vance on Trump’s so-called “family separation” policies, while you can expect Vance — like Trump — to raise immigration generally and the border in particular every chance he gets.
Vance doesn’t paint with as broad a brush on the issues as Trump does and will likely get into the weeds on most issues, immigration included. Inasmuch as (per Trende), little is known about any Harris-Walz policy (immigration included), the governor will likely stick to personal attacks like “family separation” on Trump and Vance.
No one forces Americans to cast a ballot — they only vote if they want to. Given that immigration is a key issue for the electorate, and that will likely turn out working-class voters for the GOP, expect Trump and Vance to bang the border drum until November 5, while Harris and Walz attempt to pipe any different tune.