with reaction and insights to the biggest stories and breaking news from the USA and a little

bit of history thrown in. This is America, a history in the making.

Hello and welcome to another America, a history in the making with me, Liam Heffernan. Also,

you may well hear my dog in the background because it is dinner time, so excuse that. But more

importantly, joining me today is Andrew Rowe, Senior Lecturer in American Politics at the

University of Kent. Hello, Andrew. Hi, Liam. Good to be with you. Yeah, really good to have

you on the podcast. You know, I usually do a bit of an introduction, this is what we're

going to be talking about today. I think everyone knows what we're going to be talking about

today. Obviously, the Harris-Trump debate happened last night or for us in the UK, early hours

of this morning. There was a lot of anticipation about it. There's been a lot of reaction to

it. What are your initial thoughts? Who won? I think this is a win for Kamala Harris. I

think most commentators. in the center saying that, obviously some on the right are suggesting

that Trump might have won it. Trump himself is suggesting that he won it apparently. Of

course he is. Apparently he came into the spin room after the event, which itself is highly

unusual. Usually their candidates rely on their surrogates to do the spinning, but Trump came

into the spin room and apparently according to the New York Times said it was the best

debate he'd ever had. He probably wasn't paying much attention if that was the case. He said,

well, if Kamala wants another debate, that's because she knows she's lost. What proportion

of that is actually, Trump believes and what proportion of that is just spinny, is difficult

to pin down. Most commentators from the mainstream media and probably most Americans think that

Kamala Harris. won this debate. I agree. And I mean, this guy, Trump is, I mean, love him

or hate him. He gives entertainment value, doesn't he? And I saw a clip of him in that spin room

and he was reeling off these numbers, like these polls that he was given saying that 90% of

people thought he won the debate. Like it's madness. He just like these are just bare faced

lies. Absolutely. There's no evidence for these assertions at all. And I think, you know, Kamala

Harris picked up on this in the debate and said that he's often, I think she said he's confused

by facts. And, you know, the stuff he was saying in this room just confirms that, you know,

there's sort of an alternate reality thing going on here. Yeah. But, you know, that's always

the way that Trump has been. You know, he has his own reality, has his own facts. He has

his own alternative facts. And to be fair to him, he's done pretty well by that approach.

He has. And, you know, I guess to his credit, maybe that's the wrong word, but it worked

very well against Biden and it did against Clinton as well. It didn't so much against Harris and

we'll get on to that. But I just want to clear up the numbers a little bit before we dive

into the specifics. So there was a sort of snap poll from CNN after. the debate. You've got

some of those numbers in front of you. What are the highlights from that? Yeah, okay. Yeah,

so CNN did a snap poll and they were polling registered voters who watched the debate live.

And of Harris supporters, acknowledged Harris supporters, 96% of those thought that their

candidate, Kamala Harris, had done the better job. Interestingly, Trump supporters, so these

are registered Trump supporters. Only 69% of those thought that their candidate, Donald

Trump, had done the best job. So you can see that straight away, even though sort of, you

know, Trump idealists, those ideologues, recognize that their candidate, some of those recognize

that their candidate had not had the best night. Overall, 63%. said Harris had performed better

than Trump, and 37% thought that Trump had performed better. But I think what's important is, this

election is gonna be decided by a few percentage points in a few swing states. And there's large

proportions of Americans are in one camp or the other. They're not shifting. It's what's

happening to the moderates, to the independent voters in the middle. And interestingly, what

this CNN poll showed was that amongst independents, Harris's favorability rating went up from just

30% to 48% Wow. Over the course of the debate. And that is quite a significant shift. Because

those are the people who are not yet aligned to one candidate or the other. And this debate

therefore may have shifted them one way or the other. But we've got to remember. those are

very small proportion of the electorate. But even saying that, there are small portion of

the electorate, but it's going to be those very small shifts that actually determine the outcome.

This election is on a razor wire, and it's going to be determined by a few tens of thousands

of votes in the key three or four swing states. Yeah, this is the thing. And, you know, as

you say, these snap polls only give us part of the story, but, you know, it's going to

be very, very promising sort of... numbers for the Harris camp for sure. I think what's really

most interesting about those polls is the low numbers of Trump supporters that thought he

won the debate because you'd expect that to be the other way around because Trump supporters

are loyal to an ignorant degree sometimes I would say. What they're willing to believe

from Trump and the lengths that they go to support Trump are other political candidates. The fact

that only 60% of them believe that he won says to me that maybe there's a growing apathy now

towards Trump. Maybe those people that he could rely on to go out and vote, maybe that's a

harder sell than it was four years ago and that could be a real problem for him. I mean, 69%

of Trump supporters thought that he did a better job. We can't infer from that the 31% who didn't

think he did a better job are going to abandon him. I don't see that happening. It might diminish

turnout a little. He probably didn't do anything in this debate, didn't do anything for him

in winning over independence. He was focused very much on his base, hitting all the old

golden oldies that he does at every single rally. That's really not what he should have been

doing in this debate. Who do I need to win over to win this election? And he's got to be thinking

about those people in the middle, those few uncommitted voters that remain. And this performance

didn't do anything to attract that demographic. That's the thing though. Like if that 31% of

the Trump fan base can't even pretend that he won the debate, it doesn't say a lot about

how many of that undecided sort of electorate going to be energized enough to go out and

vote for him. And I just think maybe there's a bit of fatigue now creeping in over the whole

Trump game and this playground bully tactic that he goes in hard with. It's not working

against Harris. So that became really clear in the debate as well, the way she just picked

him apart and just she knew how to bait him and she made him look really silly. I mean,

she prepared really well for this debate. You know, you could see that. You could see that

in her answers. She had a clear strategy and part of that strategy was to wind him up. Yeah.

As you said, it was to needle him and she was very effective at that. She really... He really

tried to get under his skin and it worked. Yeah. I don't really know what Trump's strategy was.

Whatever it was, it didn't work. I mean, I did see a very interesting tweet after the debate,

which was that as much as we sort of criticised Trump for having no real sort of strategy during

the debate,

As soon as he talked about the Haitians eating dogs in Springfield, there was probably a hell

of a lot of people that suddenly went onto Google and were searching for that rather than paying

attention to what Harris said afterwards. So actually, there is a bit of a game plan there

in that Trump was just resorting to distraction. Like, look over here, don't pay attention to

what she's saying over there. Yeah. Yes. Trump's very good at that. at distracting people. I

mean, I think if he did have a strategy, thinking about this, it was possibly to try and create

an image of Harris as a radical. He was referring to her as a far left radical. I think he might

have even called her a Marxist at one point, linking her... to her father who taught Marx

at Stanford, and that therefore made her a Marxist. I mean, it's ludicrous. But the problem is

that if he's trying to portray her as a Marxist, she was first of all, she didn't take the bait.

And secondly, nothing she said confirmed what Trump was trying to portray. The argument just

looked silly on its own terms, given the nature of the debate and given Kamala Harris's answers

to both the moderators and her responses to Trump. I mean, if that was his game plan to

portray her as a radical Marxist, that didn't work either. Yeah. Do you think that Trump

just grossly underestimated Harris going into this? Because I think one of the concerns towards

Harris going into this debate was that, you know, she's a prosecutor. So yeah, she can

talk to a crowd, but she's used to being the one interviewing rather than being interviewed

and her sort of slight discomfort around that has become quite clear. Not only four years

ago when she just really failed to win over crowds when she was fighting for the candidacy

then, but she's been very reluctant to do these sit down interviews with the media. And I just

wonder if Trump just really naively and with a lot of his own narcissism fueling it just

thought, ah. If I can take down Biden, I can take down Harris. I think there's also deep

seated misogyny there as well. Yeah. Thinking this is a woman. I'm a man. I'm better than

her. You know, he underestimated her perhaps because she was a woman. You know, he has called

her dumb, stupid, low IQ on so many occasions going into this debate. I mean, you know, that's

a... one of his standard insults he throws off against many of his opponents. But he could

have actually internalized that, as you suggest, and convinced himself that she genuinely is

a low IQ individual, which of course she's not. She's highly intelligent. And actually, as

we saw last night, very articulate. And also had the good sense to prepare really thoroughly

for this encounter. I was reading in the American newspapers that she was locked up for nearly

a week preparing for this debate. And you could see by her answers, she was highly informed.

She was very well prepared. And also when she had questions which were really difficult,

she had a pivot. She pivoted to a set of talking points, which flummoxed Trump and also got

her out of a sticky spot on some really, really difficult issues. So she was intelligent. She's

articulate. And she was well prepared. And yeah, and as you suggest, Trump probably wasn't expecting

that. He expected to be able to bamboozle her. Uh, and he, he couldn't. In fact, it was the

other way around if anything. I agree, but I actually think to, um, and I don't do this

very often, but to just ever so slightly come to Trump's defense for the past, you know,

eight years that he's been running for president, uh, he's been able to employ those tactics

very successfully. And. and not with inexperienced adversaries like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden.

You don't get many more experienced and qualified Democrats than them two. He lost to Biden in

2020, but he turned the tables on Clinton in an election that he was expected to lose. He's

ended Biden's candidacy in the debate back in June. So what is it that Harris has done that's

so different? Well, I mean, I'm not sure that Trump ended Biden's presidency. I think Biden

ended Biden's presidency. Trump didn't do much in that debate. This was an act of self-destruction

by a sitting president. Trump sort of sat on the sidelines and had the good sense to let

Biden unravel by himself. He didn't interject. He just let Biden go on. And if we go back

to the debates between Clinton and Trump in 2016, I don't think Trump bested Clinton in

those debates. So I think over the course of them, I think probably Clinton was the overall

winner. And if you think about the popular vote, Clinton won 3 million more votes than Trump

did in 2016. He just happened to win the votes where it mattered and that allowed him to win.

He got a small narrow victory in the electoral, fairly narrow victory in the electoral college.

I just think it's Trump, it's Trump's character, isn't it? I mean, you know, I don't think there's

like a sophisticated political strategy driving Trump's behavior. I think, you know, as he

said on many times, he goes on his gut, he's got, I've got a gut, he says, I've got a gut.

And he just goes with it. But it's also an arrogance and an narcissism there, as you say, where

he thinks he doesn't have to prepare. that he is better than everybody else. Actually, I

think that he's actually born ultimately if he's a deeply insecure individual. He talks

about strength and all this other stuff. But I think at core, he's a deeply insecure individual

who masks that with this image of being very strong, a very strong individual. But in terms

of strategy, he's not deeply thought through. Always advisors were saying before this debate,

focus on policy, focus on policy. That's where you beat. Kamala Harris on immigration, on

the economy. This is where you beat her. And he couldn't help himself. No. He couldn't stop

the personal attacks. He would just, and he let, as we said before, he let Kamala Harris

needle him. And he would just go off on these mad tangents, for example, about eating dogs

and cats. And he was just, he was absolutely bonkers. But he was saying that because she

got under his skin. Yeah, I agree. And the baits were so... obvious as well. Of course, she

was trying to throw him off on immigration because he could talk directly to his base. So when

she talks about the rally crowds and has little digs, I don't think any politician would really

expect the other person to take the bait as much as Trump did. But man, did he buy it.

He couldn't help himself. No. I'm sure. His advisors were saying to him, you know, in the

run up to the debate, or trying to prep him not to get drawn in, not to be needled. But

you could see, you know, as soon as she mentioned that it was brilliant, that was a brilliant

line from Harris. As soon as she started talking about his crowd sizes and their stamina and

how they were bored and they were leaving, he couldn't help himself. And he had to go in

on the attack. But that wasn't the only line, you know, she attacked him. on Project 2025.

She said other world leaders were laughing at him. I mean, that's probably the thing that

Trump hates the most is the thought that people are laughing at him because it speaks to this

insecurity which I just spoke about before. So he hates that, but she knows that and she

was needling him on world leaders laughing at him. She was needling him on his six bankruptcies.

Yeah, she brought that up. She was needling him about former staff who were bad mouthing

him. She was intimating very... John Kelly, who was his former chief, he didn't use his

name, but she was intimating John Kelly, his former chief of staff who disowned him. She

was talking about his criminal indictments. Then she had that great line where she said,

and you were fired by 81 million people, which is brilliant because it just goes back to Trump's

thing about the apprentice and his celebrities that you were fired by 81 million people. Then

she went on and said, clearly you're having trouble processing that. He hated it. Yeah,

I think because there's this, she knew, she knew that there were little conversations happening

and circling around Trump, around his competency now, the same sort of conversations that were

happening around Biden. And okay, not to the same degree. I'm not going to even try and

suggest that Trump's going to be forced to step down. But you know, Trump now has to deal with

being the old candidate. one who has to justify his age and his, you know, competency and he

can't do it. He was, he, I mean, you know, considering his age, considering, what is it, 78? 78, yeah.

He's still, you know, he's still dynamic. He's still a presence. He's still charismatic in

a way that Biden certainly was not in that, in that debate with him. He's, you know, he's

still there. He's still sort of got that, that. that presence. But his words, I mean, he's

always been a rambler. He's always gone off on huge tangents and digressions. That's just

the way that he speaks. The question is, is he getting worse? It's difficult to quantify.

I don't know. If he'd been more disciplined, then... know, if he hadn't taken the debate,

then maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation about his age. Maybe it's because, you know,

Kamala Harris was able to needle him, she was riling him, and that led to this sort of outburst,

these digressions, these sort of mad responses, which then lead us to question his mental faculties.

Yeah, I agree. And, you know, I think one of the criticisms I did notice in after the debate,

particularly and probably predictably coming from the Republican side, is that he wasn't

really given a very fair chance. ABC have come under some criticism because of the fairness

of the moderators. There's definitely pockets of criticism saying that they were fact checking

Trump a lot more than they were Kamala, that they were sort of letting things slide a lot

more with Kamala. I mean... I've looked at the numbers since and actually Trump had about

four minutes more speaking time. I think he was allowed to interject a lot more and they

really did give him a lot of license to keep talking even over his allotted time. So I'm

not really buying that criticism and it just kind of feels like Republicans are clutching

at straws a bit, if I'm honest. Yeah, sounds like sour grapes a little bit. The format was

each candidate had two minutes. to make their point and then the opposite candidate got two-minute

rebuttal time and then the moderators could give candidates an extra minute if they deemed

that it was worth it. And if you add all that together, Kamala Harris spoke for 38 minutes

and Donald Trump spoke for 43 minutes. Yeah, so there was a five-minute difference there.

Trump definitely had more floor time than Harris. But if you look at how they used that floor

time, that's what's interesting. of Kamala Harris's 38 minutes, she spent 17 minutes attacking

Trump, putting him on the defensive, riling him. Of Trump's 43 minutes, he only spent 13

minutes attacking Kamala Harris. He had more time and he also used it less effectively,

largely because Kamala Harris was putting him on the defensive and also because he was rambling

as well. But this idea that the moderators did a poor job, I mean, I just didn't see it that

way. I think they did a decent job. They didn't get, often when Trump's in these sorts of debates,

he often ends up attacking the moderators there and then. He's done that overtly in the past.

He didn't do that. He never questioned the moderators because I think he probably thought they were

doing a fair job. Of course, now this is over. will, as he always does, he will pivot and

he will blame the moderators. I don't know whether he's already done this, but I have no question

that he will now say something along the lines of they were very biased and very unfair, very

anti-Trump. I'm sure that's rang the corner. That's his go-to line. It is. And I think he

has actually done an interview on Fox News since the debate and basically said that. That's

what he always says. Yeah, I mean, no great insights on my part. It's just a classic Trump

line to blame. Yeah. But this is the thing, people just getting a bit bored with hearing

the same things and the same comebacks. And, you know, it's just, he's doing exactly what

he did in 2016 and it just feels like now people are wise to it. Yeah. He hasn't progressed

very much as a politician, you could say. He's still hitting all the old golden oldies, all

the same issues. in the same way, attacking people. But as we know, he's been president

of the United States for four years. So not exactly a failure. He's had the top job. He's

been the most important person in the world for four years. And he still dominates the

Republican party. He's still one of the big beasts of American politics and maybe will

carry on for the next few years. It's worked for him. Yeah, and you know, I guess it's important

to note that, you know, Kamala Harris didn't win a

primary election to become the candidate for the Democrats. Trump has been through that

process twice and then, you know, as an incumbent as well, which is essentially just a no contest,

right? But I guess you can say he's been there, he's done it, he's proven he can win elections

and Kamala still has that to prove. I mean, she won a senatorial election in California,

she won various local state elections, but yes, she's not taken the top job and she hasn't

won a democratic primary either. I mean, also, to give some credit to Trump. He is the Republican,

he's changed the Republican Party. The Republican Party has fundamentally shifted in character

over the past, well, since 2016. It is a very, very different beast than it was not even 10

years ago. So he is the dominant character on the right of American politics. Yeah. And that

takes some doing, you know, you can think about maybe Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, you know,

being such a force and Republican Party sort of coalescing around his political ideology.

He didn't do that in the same way with either Bush, with Bush senior or Bush junior, but

he's done it with Trump. He is the dominant character. And it'd be interesting to see,

you know, when he leaves the stage, where the Republican Party goes, does it go back to its

old? Is the old Republican Party of Reagan or does it carry on being a Trumpy type Republican

Party? We don't know. But at the moment, he's the person. He's the big beast. Yeah. Yeah,

I agree. And I think the Republican Party in a post-Trump world is going to look very, very

different and it'll be interesting to see how that sort of shapes up. But as you said earlier,

Harris, we talked about Clinton in 2016, she won the popular vote by three million. Democrats

typically do win the popular vote nationally, but it's not about the popular vote. And there

are seven states that don't represent an awful lot of electoral college votes, but they hold

the keys to the election because they're the ones who are generally swayed either way. How

do you think the debate helped or maybe hindered either candidate's ability to win over? those

swing states? That's a really tough question. I mean, the effect will probably be very small

in terms of, you know, moving voters one way or the other, or, you know, encouraging voters

to come out and vote. But those small shifts are going to make all the difference in those

swing states. So marginal effects can actually have significant consequences. Yeah. You know,

it's It's really hard to know. Political scientists have tried to estimate the effect of debates

on vote choices and election outcomes. It's just really hard. It's really, really difficult

to do so. In part because debates are just one of many, many things happening in a very dynamic

political space. I think Kamala Harris will get a small bang from this. Some of the national

polling might change by a percentage point, perhaps. In the swing states, we might get

a similar movement. But I think whatever movement we see from this, it will be within the polls

margin of error. We just can't be confident about the effects it will have. One thing I

am confident about is it won't have hurt Kamala Harris. Yeah, I think we can say it was a good

night for her. And we can say it probably hasn't helped Trump and it was a bad night for him.

Yeah. So, you know, Kamala Harris can put this down as a win. Yeah. And it's not just about

the effect on votes, you know, on people directly, you know, changing their... their vote choice,

it has an effect on money coming into the campaign. Yeah. Right. It has an effect on the enthusiasm

of your campaign workers. It has an effect on the enthusiasm of people who attend your rallies.

And a lot of it is about momentum. And we saw from the moment that Joe Biden stepped back

and Kamala Harris stood up, we saw this sort of momentum, which was in her favor. that seemed

to have stalled a little bit before the debate. She seemed to have sort of plateaued. She was

right, I mean, there were small changes. She was rising in the polls and it just seemed

to have stalled before the debate. This might be the sort of event that gives her a little

bit of momentum, yeah? That just gives her campaign that edge that takes her forward as we approach,

you know, that we go into the sort of... the critical end of this campaign. So it definitely

hasn't done any harm and it might do her campaign as a whole a lot of good. Yeah, I agree with

you completely. And actually, yeah, when you do look at those numbers and look at such,

you know, the narrow margins that are in the swing states, actually, you know, yeah, you

start with like 150 million votes across the country. But in reality, the winner... of the

presidency only actually has to talk to this undecided kind of $50,000 or less that make

the difference in those swing states. And it's crazy to think that that's really what gets

you to the White House, but that's how the Electoral College works. That is, the Electoral College

is a very, very strange institution. Yeah, I mean, you know,

college since 2004. That was the last time they won, but they've won lots of presidential elections.

George W. Bush won in 2000 on a minority of the vote. Al Gore won more popular votes, but

George Bush became president. 2016, Trump winning many, many fewer votes than his opponent. Hillary

Clinton but clinching the Electoral College. There's an institutional bias at the moment

in the Electoral College that favors Republicans and you know Kamala Harris, it doesn't matter

if she piles up millions of votes in California or New York, that's not going to make the difference.

It's what happens in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada,

and so on. That's absolutely critical. There's about 100 electoral, it's 538 electoral college

votes in total. There's about 100 electoral college votes which are going to decide this

election. So about 435, 440 electoral college votes, we know where they're going. And they're

going equally to both candidates. They've both got about 220 of those 440 electoral college.

votes, it's the other 100, where are they going? That's how this election is going to be decided.

And I'm bringing back to that, to the debate last night. I think the debate has given Kamala

Harris some momentum that she was perhaps just starting to lose. I think it's going to be

really good for her campaign over the next few weeks. But then, you know, there's still, I

don't know how many days, there is 50 plus days to go. 55 days. 55 days, there's lots that

can happen in the meantime. When it's this close, little things can determine the act. Many,

many little things can determine which way this goes. Absolutely. But it's not a bad time to

get the front foot. So I think Harris and her campaign are going to be going to have had

a very good night's sleep last night following that debate. And also, we haven't even touched

on the fact that Taylor Swift promptly then publicly endorsed Kamala Harris. And I'm not

one for celebrity endorsements, but... You've got to acknowledge the influence that Taylor

Swift can have on the vote. Liam, I even watched a Taylor Swift video today on the back of this.

I've never done that in my life. And I, for some reason, there was a link on a New York

Times webpage and I watched a video. about her adopting her cat, Benjamin Buttons or something.

I don't know. I mean, sort of, yes, I mean, you know, I surprise myself. But yeah, but

I mean, I found out today that she has nearly 300 million followers. I mean, it's extraordinary.

Yeah, so it was certainly, and you know, and Kamala Harris, you know, she, key for her.

one of the keys is mobilizing young people to vote. Young people are overwhelmingly democratic,

but the problem is they don't turn out and vote. So if this swift endorsement just encourages

a few hundred thousand more young people to go out and vote, especially in those key states,

again, it's these little incremental differences that could affect the result in November. Absolutely.

And as you say, 55 days is a long time, longer than a UK general election cycle. So who knows,

anything can still happen. But for now, Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on this. It's

been great chatting with you. And for anyone who does want to connect with you after listening

to this, where can they find you? I think just put in Andrew Roe, University of Kent. and

they'll get my details at my institution happily, send me an email or such. Awesome. Thank you

very much, Andrew. And for anyone listening, thank you for listening. But also make sure

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we do more of these leading up to the election. It's an exciting time. Thank you very much

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