The real stakes for tonight’s debate

| 9:09 am EDT September 10, 2024
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If you want a sense of how falsely the media is framing tonight’s presidential debate, you need only look at the major news outlet that recently suggested Kamala Harris could be “rusty” at debating because her last debate was four years ago. Nevermind that Donald Trump has only done one debate himself in the past four years, and he performed even more poorly than President Biden did.

But there are the facts and then there are the media narratives, and the media has sort of laughably settled on the narrative that it’s Harris who’s somehow facing pressure going into this debate. Nevermind that she’s ahead four points in the polling averages, and that Trump is so far gone he might spend the entire time talking about Hannibal Lecter. The media has decided that portraying Harris as being under pressure is better for ratings than portraying Trump as being under pressure, and so this is the narrative they’re giving us.

Not that it matters. If anything the media may be unwittingly doing Kamala Harris a favor by setting expectations a bit lower for her. She will, of course, win the debate. And it won’t be particularly close. The catch is that because everyone knows Trump is a goner and expectations are so perversely low for him, he might be able to make himself look fairly good just by not completely falling apart.

Still, the most likely outcome is that Kamala Harris puts in a strong performance (it doesn’t have to be perfect) and that Donald Trump rants and meanders and impresses no one, and that a majority of people come away concluding that Harris won the debate. Then we’ll wait to see if a debate victory helps to jumpstart Harris’ national poll numbers, which have been stagnant for a few weeks.

This debate is a big opportunity for Kamala Harris to turn her four point lead into a seven point lead and make this race non-competitive. This debate is also Trump’s best and perhaps only remaining chance to change any minds on a large scale. So all the pressure is on him. That’s not what you want to hear when you’re already firmly behind and you’re too feeble to even function on a campaign stage, let alone an adversarial situation like a debate.