When Cayce Hill watched the presidential debate with friends and neighbors in her San Jose front room, she was convinced that Kamala Harris had won. The vice chairman struck her as commanding and compassionate, and he or she so unsettled Donald Trump that his false tirade about immigrants in Ohio eating cats and dogs became the climax for much of America.
But when it was throughout and the pizza boxes still sat on the kitchen counter, Hill – a die-hard Democrat with a Harris campaign sign up her front yard – curled up on her couch and grimaced.
“The idea that we shouldn't be too confident really makes me nervous,” said Hill, 49, recalling 2016, when Hillary Clinton crushed Trump within the presidential debate and still lost the election. “I'm really worried.”
Instant audience polls showed Harris, a former California attorney general and U.S. senator who grew up in Berkeley, had clearly won the controversy. A dozen hands shot up in Hill's front room when asked in the event that they thought Harris had won, and in a long-awaited boon to the Harris campaign, megastar Taylor Swift sent a tweet endorsing Harris 27 minutes after the controversy ended. That response was the polar opposite of the Trump-Biden debate in June, which was so disastrous for President Joe Biden that Democratic leaders forced him to desert his reelection campaign and endorse his vice chairman as an alternative.
“The Biden debate was consequential, but that was because Biden was bad, not because Trump was good,” said Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. Speaking of the controversy with Harris on Tuesday, he said, “If this had been a prize fight, they would have stopped it halfway through.”
Nevertheless, analysts imagine the race will likely be close.
As political scientist David McCuan of Sonoma State University put it, Harris should enjoy a brief 1-2 percentage point bump within the polls through Thursday, then Swift's support will proceed the “sugar rush” until she is 3-5 percentage points ahead. That's a major lead given the close race, he said, but Harris needs more support within the swing states.
“If he had won the debate, it would have been a bitter fight to the end,” McCuan said. “Now it's a fight between dogs and bitches that Kamala Harris is instigating.”
Despite Trump's often grim split-screen appearance, his diehard supporters imagine he got here across as strong and convincing, despite what they see as unfair treatment from the anchors who’ve fact-checked him over time – including ABC's David Muir, who said there was no evidence Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pets.
“It feels like three against one,” said Genevieve Perez, a retiree from Millbrae who attended an election party in Pacifica together with her Republican colleagues on Tuesday night. Richard Middleton, a 62-year-old retired veteran from Pacifica, was one among the loudest laughers on the GOP election party held on the clubhouse bar at Sharp Park Golf Course in Pacifica. As Trump taunted Harris throughout the evening, he laughed along and clapped when Trump claimed Biden “hates” Harris.
“He is the stronger leader,” Middleton said.
Still, some Republicans expressed a creeping concern that Trump's inability to broaden support amongst his loyal electorate could hurt his probabilities on Nov. 5. A 71-year-old San Francisco landlord frightened Trump might come across as too aggressive.
“I’m not sure this debate will really convince a moderate voter,” noted one observer of the Republican debate.
If one among Harris's predominant goals at the controversy was to disparage Trump, it appeared to work at a campaign party at San Jose State University, where 30 students were crammed right into a basement room beneath the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. Most of them seemed as amused and baffled as Harris when Trump made a daring claim about pet-eating immigrants in Ohio. At the identical time, though, they gave Trump credit for silencing Harris by utilizing her own catchphrase against her — “I'm talking now” — and offering her a MAGA hat when he suggested she had “adopted” a few of his own campaign ideas.
Republican student Jordan Robinson, a 20-year-old third-year student at San Jose State University, said he was disillusioned with Trump's performance, which he said was “mixed.”
“By talking too much and trying to make points that weren't asked, he's not coming across as well,” Robinson said. “While I don't entirely agree with Kamala, she's stayed a little more on track and knows when to speak, which makes her seem better tonight.”
Students seemed largely impressed with Harris, posting fire emojis on their phones and joking that she “ate it” – Gen Z slang for “killing it.”
Originally published:
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