On Politics: I rewatched the Trump-Clinton debates so you don’t have to
I rewatched the Trump-Clinton debates so you don't have to
Tomorrow, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will take part in a debate that could shape the rest of the presidential race and perhaps the country's future. It's the first time they are so much as meeting in person, a fact that imbues the coming confrontation with a jolt of unpredictability. We do, though, know a lot about how both candidates approach debates. My colleague Lisa Lerer dived into the combative debate style Harris honed over decades in the rough-and-tumble gauntlet that is San Francisco politics. And I decided to consider what we learned about Trump's debate skills the last time he took the stage with a woman who was standing between himself and the presidency — which meant spending my weekend rewatching every one of the 270 minutes Trump and Clinton spent onstage together in 2016. Those debates gave Trump a reputation for being undisciplined and brutish onstage, a man whose hailstorm of interruptions and half-truths stood in stark contrast to Clinton's focused calm. If there was any winner over the four and a half hours they spent fighting on television, it seemed at the time like it was her. Watching it now, though, I see it differently. Trump was a more cunning debater than he got credit for at the time, one who wielded ugly sexist attacks to his benefit, turned Clinton's perceived strengths into weaknesses, and used his time onstage to steady his campaign. What is less clear is whether he can deploy the same strategy this time — and whether or not it will work. Here's what I learned rewatching the three Clinton-Trump debates. Trump's delivery was chaotic — but his message was focusedTrump built his campaign on an upswell of grievance. From his first moments on the debate stage, he cast Clinton as a fixture of a self-dealing political system responsible for the nation's underlying problems — and he kept to that core message, despite his chaotic delivery. "Hillary, I'd just ask you this," Trump said minutes into the first debate, as the two tussled over the economy. "You've been doing this for 30 years. Why are you just thinking about these solutions right now?" Later, when Trump blamed Clinton for jobs leaving the country, she joked that "by the end of this evening, I'm going to be blamed for everything that's ever happened." Trump interrupted her, but stayed on theme: "Why not?" It helped him define Clinton as a political figure who did not care about regular voters — and it's similar to attacks he has deployed against Harris, in which he suggests she will continue unpopular economic policies and blames her for talking about problems she failed to fix while in office. It's not clear, however, that he'll stay focused on that or any other single attack on Harris tomorrow, because he has not yet established a core, driving argument against her. Instead, he frequently strays from economic criticisms to an array of personal attacks and other complaints. Trump reached for sexist attacksI wrote today about how, over the course of those three debates and in other onstage clashes with women, Trump wrote a playbook that combined explicitly gendered attacks with more insidious attempts to erode Clinton's standing with voters by leaning on sexist ideas. "He loves to humiliate women, loves to talk about how disgusting we are," Mrs. Clinton wrote in a 2017 book. "He was hoping to rattle me." Over the course of their meetings, Trump made fun of Clinton's former title as secretary of state, interrupted her when she talked about her qualifications and said she lacked the "stamina" to be president. During their second debate, he seemed intent on physically diminishing her by prowling the stage, looming behind her and pointing directly at her while she was seated and he was standing. He also frequently denounced her husband, former President Bill Clinton, mirroring the way today he sometimes shifts from attacks on Harris to attacks on President Biden, as if a man deserves more attention than do his female opponents. He has already indicated that he does not want Harris to appear any larger than she is onstage, posting on his social media site last week that "boxes and artificial lifts" should not be allowed during the debate. Trump used a debate to steady a campaign in crisisThe most striking moment of all three debates might be the beginning of the second Trump-Clinton debate. A tape from "Access Hollywood" in which Trump boasted lewdly about grabbing women's private parts had leaked just two days before, and Trump's campaign was in crisis. Clinton refused to shake his hand, not wanting to legitimize him. But what happened over the next 90 minutes did anyway. Trump was asked directly about the tape during the second question, and he struggled to defend himself, offering little more than brief apologies and labored efforts to change the subject, including an attempt to blame Clinton for attacking the women who had accused her husband of unwanted sexual advances. As Clinton sought to portray Trump as morally unfit to lead — "It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country," she said — Trump responded with a threat. "Because you'd be in jail," he warned. It was a remarkable moment. And then, the debate moved on. The next question, from ABC's Martha Raddatz, concerned Clinton's use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state. Later, Clinton and Trump tangled over issues like health care, immigration and the war in Syria. Looking back now, Trump, a showman who has long understood the resonance of television images, seemed to be betting on the power of the staid debate stage itself, calculating that just being seen there, talking about anything other than the tape, could help his campaign weather the crisis. His recovery seemed to happen in real time. By the end, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, his running mate who initially said he could not "defend" Trump's comments on the tape, congratulated him on Twitter for the big victory. A debate, after all, is still television — a medium in which Trump is often in his element, no matter the circumstances. He is likely to draw on those instincts tomorrow, although he will face an opponent with different skills from any he has faced before.
Many voters have been offended by Trump. They still may vote for him.Democrats have long hoped that Donald Trump could be their best ally in turning voters against him because he has so often said things people find offensive. New polling from The New York Times and Siena College may deflate some of those hopes. I asked our polling editor, Ruth Igielnik, to tell us more. On the surface, this would seem like a good statistic for Kamala Harris: 70 percent of voters say Trump has said something they found offensive. But when you dig a little deeper, it gets complicated. Forty-three percent of voters said he has said something they found offensive recently, and 27 percent said the offense was not recent. Harris wins the recently offended by a wide margin of 75 percentage points. But Trump wins the group who said they have been offended by him, but not recently, by 40 percentage points. The voters who have been offended by Trump in the past are mostly Republicans, but a sizable share are Democrats, and a quarter of them voted for Biden in 2020. They are capable of finding Trump's rhetoric offensive — it just does not seem to affect their vote as much. The findings suggest there may be limited efficacy for the Harris campaign in returning voters' attentions to the things Trump has said in the past. A focus on policy, however, may pay more dividends. Sixty percent of voters who heard about Project 2025, a conservative set of policy proposals drawn up by Trump's allies, said they opposed the policies it contains. — Ruth Igielnik Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
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