One of the things I’ll be watching in tonight’s debate is which voters each candidate will speak to directly.
Each side has their own theory about what coalition of voters they need to win, and what’s striking is that, while both sides have the same challenge, they seem to be approaching it differently so far.
Let’s look at a small subset of voters who are truly torn between the two candidates. Most of these voters are centrists, but not entirely centrists. There are also conservative Republicans who cannot support Trump on personality issues — the Cheneys represent this group. There are also very progressive people who don’t trust either party (Cornel West is trying to appeal to these people). And still others may be to the right in theory, but belong to a group of libertarians who worry that both parties have expanded government too much and that the Republicans are a little too intrusive in people’s private lives. And yes, there are still many voters who are truly centrists, who just want assurances that the most extreme wings of both parties won’t have much influence.
Harris has targeted these voters with tone over substance: She is simply trying to position herself broadly in the political mainstream, using her “turn the page” motto to appeal to both left-leaning progressives and disaffected Cheney Republicans.
The Trump campaign is targeting undecided voters in a different way than before. They are no longer trying to recruit these people as “Trump supporters.” Instead, their theory is to find more MAGA-leaning supporters from voting groups that don’t usually vote (such as young single working-class men), and then do what they can to disqualify Harris from these center-left and center-right voters, perhaps even convincing them to vote for a third party or skip the presidential election. They just want to move these voters away from Harris, not recruit them as Trump supporters.
Trump’s election strategy was to make 48% a winning number, and that would only come if he could deny support to Harris from what we called “double-hater” voters, named for those who have unfavorable views of both Trump and Biden.
For me, the candidate who is most effective at moving disaffected voters in either direction will be the one I consider the “winner” of this debate. Ultimately, debates are won or lost by whether they move the electorate, not by what individual pundits, parties, or columnists think. The way to know who has been successful with this important group of voters is to look at Harris’ personal ratings. Does her disapproval rating go up, stay the same, or go down? If it goes up, that probably means Harris didn’t try hard enough (or Trump tried hard enough) to convince skeptical moderates that she’s not as progressive as Trump is trying to portray her. If her approval rating doesn’t move much or improve even slightly, that means progress has been made in convincing voters that she’s a safer risk than Trump.
Another thing to watch is whether either candidate will admit mistakes. After all, voters dismissed Trump in 2020 because they thought his first term was a failure. Now Trump is trying to convince people that Biden was worse and that his term wasn’t so bad in retrospect. But usually, candidates who try to win after losing an election admit some mistakes. Trump and admitting mistakes are as bad as mustard and jam sandwiches. But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t try. As for Harris, voters decided earlier this year that Biden’s term was not a success. Of course, Harris can’t accept the premise that Biden’s term was a failure, but she can admit that they got some things wrong and learned some lessons from it. Will Harris do that? If so, how? Will she distance herself from Biden subtly or a little more dramatically?
It is doubtful that either of them will admit to mistakes made during their time in office, but if either of them does, I think it will have a major impact on voters who once hated them both.
