Sixteen thoughts on a great debate

This is what it's like to play as an underdog

Kamala Harris was the clear winner of last night’s debate, to the extent that one doesn’t need to argue the point. The volume of conservatives whining about the moderation proves it, as does the fact that Harris is already asking for more debates. But I do think the logic of the debate illustrates some of the broader dynamics of the campaign in a way that’s important and worth teasing out.

1. I think the signature move of Kamala Harris’ debate triumph last night was that she took calculated risks.

2. From the decision to prebut Trump by declaring right at the top that he was going to lie a lot, to using obviously pre-canned lines to bait him into rambling about stuff like crowd sizes, she did things that worked really well ex post but ex ante might have failed. Trump, in theory, could have been scrupulously honest. He could have decided not to take the bait and remained disciplined. I don’t know what Harris’ Plan B was if her gambits failed, or whether her instincts about when to switch into Plan B would have served her well. But the gambits didn’t fail.

3. At the height of Democrats’ weekend poll freakout, her communications director said that, “Since she became the nominee, Vice President Harris has considered herself the underdog in this race. She continues to campaign with that mentality.” That’s the right line to take. At the convention, Tim Walz described the ticket as a football team that’s down a field goal in the fourth quarter but with possession of the ball.

4. My biggest critique of the Harris campaign is that they often don’t act like they believe they are underdogs. They sometimes act more like a football team that’s up a field goal in the fourth quarter and trying to run out the clock.

5. This is important precisely because of the question of calculated risk. Fallon’s tweet ended not with a discussion of risk, but with the observation that there’s “a lot of work to do in these last 50+ days.” A generic warning against complacency is good. But a team that’s up a field goal in the fourth quarter can’t get complacent either. That’s a close game! What a team with a lead can, and should, do is behave in a somewhat risk-averse manner, knowing that the default option is they win the game. A team that’s down by three points needs to take calculated risks to change things up. I said on August 6 that Walz himself was a “safe, low-upside pick,” which, though not a diss on Walz, was not a compliment on his selection. Safe is good when you have a lead, it’s bad when you’re down.

6. The debate itself was the opposite of that — no crazy risks, but reasonable calculated ones. The baiting and the prebuttal. The decision to make evocative facial expressions on the split screen. The communications team that made the decision to convey that she is the underdog clearly has a communications strategy that rightly reflects that insight.

7. By the same token, she took two important steps to moderate her image: talking about how she is a gun owner (which most people didn’t know) and talking about how not only is fossil fuel production at a record level, the Inflation Reduction Act had specific provisions expanding leasing.

8. Oftentimes, Democrats take the attitude that since Trump is both unpopular and in key respects uniquely awful, victory will naturally fall to them as long as they can minimize intra-coalition dissent. That leads to approaches like trying to further consolidate the climate vote rather than smart efforts to throw the ball downfield and talk about the Biden-Harris administration’s pragmatic all-of-the-above energy strategy. Debate night Harris was throwing downfield.

9. I thought the dialogue about the Afghanistan withdrawal was especially interesting in that respect. I’ve felt from the beginning of his administration that Biden got a bad rap on Afghanistan, and I found it refreshing to hear Harris actually defend the administration’s position, which she did in part by going pretty hard after Trump. I personally liked that, but it’s not clear to me whether it was the right call. What is clear to me is that it’s not the obvious call or the conservative call. The campaign is trying something. And I do think it successfully rattled Trump’s cage and exposed his shallowness as he started talking about the Taliban. My point about this, though, isn’t that everything she tried was brilliant. It’s that as an underdog, you just need to be trying some stuff. If 100 percent of what you try works, that probably means you’re not trying enough stuff or taking enough risks.

10. The problem with the sports analogies is that if you’re down three and you run a great possession and score a touchdown, now you’re up four and need to change strategies. I’m worried that after a great debate, the campaign will fall into the same torpor that hit it after a great convention.

11. What I think Democrats need to understand about the 2024 election is that they are playing on a slanted playing field. Most voters are unhappy with the status quo and Harris is the quasi-incumbent. Something that I argue about all the time with people on the internet is whether this unhappiness is primarily a result of reality + issue positioning or a result of poor communications strategy. But even if you believe it’s the latter, that’s a mistake you’d have to go back in time one or two years to really fix. At this point, Harris is running a campaign in a climate where most people feel that the economy has been struggling and where people are very upset about the high level of people exploiting asylum loopholes.

12. You can see the slanted playing field in the thermostatic response in favor of less government activism and the very strong thermostatic response against immigration.

13. Successful presidential re-election campaigns normally navigate this kind of thing by “pivoting” fairly hard on policy after losing in the midterms. But in 2022, thanks to Dobbs and very poor GOP candidate recruitment, Democrats actually gained a Senate seat. I think that 2022 Senate outcome led the Biden administration to a position of undue complacency. They did lose the House and should have availed themselves of divided government to execute a more traditional pivot.

14. They eventually did pivot on asylum (and rightly so), just later than a president normally would, and never really did on the economy. I thought that was a losing strategy separate from Biden’s age, and I think it created a situation where the basic public discontent with the Biden administration is going to exert a steady gravitational pull against Harris.

15. That doesn’t mean Harris can’t win! She was doing great at one point, then hit some snags, but then she had a great debate. What it does mean, I think, is that she needs to always be driving the news and driving attention. That when she recedes from the scene, the system kind of defaults to a set of baseline conditions that are not favorable to her. And I don’t really think that Taylor Swift’s endorsement (she endorsed Biden, so it was hardly a big surprise) or an even bigger fundraising haul really change that.

16. What can change it is the candidate herself. I’ve been baffled by how little press Harris has done since becoming candidate, and I still find it puzzling. And, again, to be clear — I am not saying this as a challenge or dare. She’s a presidential candidate so she’d be a huge get for any show, and can mostly do stuff with friendly voices. Go on Pod Save America and Chris Hayes, and chat with Paul Krugman about Bidenomics. But then mix in some local TV news hits and a little chitchat with the traveling press. Of course, there is downside — you might gaffe, there might be problems — but there was downside risk to debating Trump and downside risk to the debate strategy she picked. But there was also upside and she kicked butt. Underdogs need to do that.