The Chaser Report - US Debate Special: Let Them Eat Canines | David Smith

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Hours after the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris finished, Dom Knight and David Smith (Associate Professor of American Politics and Foreign Policy at USYD) give it a full breakdown.To listen to PEP, Dr Dave's podcast with Chas, click here! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom. No Charles, no Andrew today. We're back to US politics mode because today was debate day in America at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia, of course, in one of the key swing states for this election, Pennsylvania. So who went better, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump?

Well, once again, Associate Professor David Smith is here from the US Study Center at the University of Sydney. Hello, David. Good afternoon. And to set the context for this, it seems as though in recent weeks, the race has perhaps tightened a little, but certainly there doesn't seem to be a clear frontrunner at this point. So both contenders hit that about stage with quite a lot to potentially win or lose. Yeah, it was a very hyped debate because this going by the polls

is the closest election campaign in 20 years. And it seems certainly in the last couple of weeks that nothing is really moving the polls. So even though presidential debates often don't really change anything in a campaign, this was seen as a debate that might. Yes, absolutely. And after the DNC bump, Kamala Harris sort of riding high there, it does seem as though things have crystallised somewhat. And I guess it does make sense, certainly, that people's view of Donald Trump would have solidified by now. But Kamala Harris still had a fair bit to do, didn't she, to solidify who she was in the minds of voters. She's been the VP, and as we've discussed on a number of occasions, it tends to mean no.

one pays attention to you for four years. Yeah. There was a New York Times-Sienna poll that showed Trump two points in front with registered voters. And one of the big things out of that poll was that 28% of voters felt that they needed to know more about Kamala Harris, whereas only 9% of voters said they needed to know more about Donald Trump. And I'm not American voter, but I'm certainly in the camp of people who don't need to know anything more about Donald Trump. You're sure one of those people? Why not listen to one of the other episodes of this? fun podcast. If you want to know more about what happened a few hours ago, really, stay with us after this. After all the argument about the rules, this is the same as the last one.

Microphones got turned off, although they did seem to sort of shout into the microphones when they were switched off and then they turned them on at various points in time. There was no crowd there. I must say, David, when it began, and I've just listened to about probably 60% of it, 70% of it, Kamala Harris really seemed quite nervous at the beginning to me. Yeah, she took a little while to get going. And I didn't think very much of her first answer when she was asked the classic question, are people better off than they were four years ago? Yeah.

She immediately started talking about her proposed tax breaks for small businesses and for parents with children. So it evaded the question, but this is one of her weakest points. And I was expecting Donald Trump to really hammer at home, but he didn't. He almost immediately started talking about his favorite topic of, immigration and pretty quickly got into internet rumors about migrants eating dogs in Ohio. Yeah, let's have a quick listen to this clip because this is probably the most shared moment of this campaign.

And it's worth watching on screen because you can see Kamala Harris using the laugh that that Donald Trump's tried to criticize in the past. Let's have a quick listen. And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk. It's not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk. about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people

that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country and it's a shame. This was just one of many, many moments. I've lost count where Donald Trump got stuck into the supposed millions of people who were flooding into America and doing all kinds of terrible things. It seemed as though that was his favorite point of the night by some degree. Yeah, so his favorite theme is they're letting in millions of immigrants and immigrants are causing crime. He repeatedly said crime is dropping everywhere in the world except the United States because all of the criminals are getting sent to America. Once again, even though he's

known for hyperbole, these kinds of statements that are just so wild that they're not in any realm of plausibility and they kept hurting him. And when it actually came to the section of the debate about immigration, which should have been his strongest section, they started first by asking Kamala Harris, and then Kamala Harris baited him by saying, oh, you should actually go to one of Donald Trump's rallies, because you'll hear him ranting about Hannibal Lecter and Wilmills causing cancer, and you'll see people leaving early through boredom and exhaustion, which meant Trump didn't even talk about his strongest area when he was asked about it. Instead, he started rambling on about his great rallies and also claiming that Carmelah Harris

bust in people for her rallies and had to pay them. So she just right from the beginning, she kept baiting him and baiting him and he kept taking the bait. And the overall effect was the performance from Trump was everything that we've seen over the last eight years that people don't like about Trump. The constant rambling, the inability to finish a sentence, the perpetual grubmitual grievances, the willingness to latch on to any internet conspiracy theory that happens to be favourable to him. That was basically what they got the whole night. And so on all of these

points that polling shows Trump has an advantage over Harris, the economy, immigration, he ended up not being able to make any impact at all because instead he was talking about things like dog eating and rally size. So I can't see him getting any new voters out of this. On the other hand, the areas in which Harris has a lot of strength, according to the polls, she managed to use that as an opportunity to really show her strength on this issue. So she was very impassioned on the issue of abortion. And the response that she got from Trump was Democrats are executing babies, which led to the first fact check of the evening from the ABC moderators who said,

There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born. Yes, he came back to it, though. He doesn't seem to be bothered by a fact check. And it was almost a forlorn effort because he's kind of counted to the fact check, which is just to say the same thing again. Yeah, and conservatives are quite upset about the fact checking that went on from the ABC moderators. But saying things like there is no state in which it's legal to kill babies

and immigrants aren't eating dogs. I don't know if that even qualifies as fact checking. That's more kind of, you know, let's get back to the real world. I just don't think that anything he said, anything Trump said, really landed, whereas Harris had at least a few moments where she did really land. So if anyone's going to pick up any new voters from this, Harris has put herself in a position to do it. And she was the person, of course, who had the most space to fill in, I suppose. But just to go back, David, to what you said before about baiting Donald Trump, we know it's been fascinating seeing, you know Kamala Harris, I think, has done something like seven days of debate prep with the person playing Donald Trump who did that right. for Hillary Clinton, which some people were a little bit concerned about, including John Stewart.

Trump, of course, disdains debate, prep, as we can tell from the debate, but policy discussions is what they call it. It seemed as though she actually booby-trapped a lot of her statements. It seemed to me, with things that were designed to get Trump off his game. And another example came when they started talking about the economy. And this is quite early on. And Kamala Harris wanted to talk about the tariffs, which the Trump, another Trump presidency, would impose on all imports.

and she quoted the Wharton School of Economics. And of course, one of Donald Trump's favorite word salad refrains is, I'm very smart, I went to the Wharton School of Economics, very smart, very smart. And so it seemed as though, particularly in areas where he might have had a case, because it's clear that in America people do feel worse off than when Joe Biden became office, whether that's their fault is another debate, of course. But it does feel like she kind of put that in there so that he is like, you know, dangling a banana in front of a cage and it gets grabbed.

And he sort of misses the substantive point. because he wants to remind everyone he went to the Wharton School. Yeah, she was clearly very well prepared for this. And, yeah, Trump's policy discussion preparation. So his opponent in that, the stand-in for Kamala Harris, was Tulsi Gabbard. Yeah. And, yeah, it's quite clear that Tulsi Gabbard did not manage to replicate Kamala Harris in the debate prep. Whenever I think of Donald Trump doing debate prep,

I think of the opponent constantly calling himself. sir. I think that that's probably what is going on. He loves that. Sir and Mr. Trump, apparently, or perhaps Mr. President now. Yes, yes. Although there was not a single story told in this debate where someone calls Trump, sir. And a lot of us had that on the bingo card in a very disappointed. And they came to me and they said, sir, sir, you're a wonderful president. But he did quote, a lot of lots of people are saying, came up quite a lot.

And he quoted of all things, he quoted Victor Orban, the Hungarian leader who's very much in the kind of Trump autocrat playbook. I think Kamala Harris quite enjoyed that. Yeah, so Victor Orban was remarkably the first foreign leader who was mentioned in the debate. And Trump talked about Victor Orban as if everyone was going to say, oh, yeah, Victor Orban. There's a seal of approval. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I mean, he's not a particularly well-known figure, but of the people who are aware of him in the US, the majority would find him pretty distasteful. The other person who got a big shout out was Abdul from the Taliban. Yes, Abdul for the Taliban. And Trump said he sent him a picture of his house, which that was fascinating. I could imagine a bit of red meat for the base there. Yeah, yeah. And this was the problem with a lot of what Trump was doing.

You have to be familiar with the whole universe of Trump references, along with the latest developments in right-wing social media, to understand what he was actually talking about. I mean, the whole reference to immigrant pet eating, that most people watching that would have had no idea what he was referring to or why he was bringing it up. Even when he said to, he tried to use one of Harris's former lines against her in her debate against Mike Pence in 2020,

she had said, Mr. Vice President, I'm speaking. And then Trump said to her, stop it, I'm speaking. Do you recognize that? Once again, that's a reference that would have made no sense to the vast majority of people who were watching it. Yeah, SNL had a bit of fun with that last time, and I can't wait to see what they do with this debate. But yeah, I mean, she did seem to be able to rattle him

and throw him off topic, although it doesn't take much. One of the ways that she really seemed to get under his skin was by referring to the indisputable fact that many of his former team members have said they wouldn't vote for him that he was a disaster. In Mike Pence's case, it got very, very personal what with the whole hang him thing. Nevertheless, yeah, he's really seen.

to get caught up in that one. Yeah, this historically is something that has always really angered him because Trump hates nothing more than disloyalty to him. So whenever you bring up Trump's former advisors, it gets an angry response. And she clearly knew this. I mean, Trump's response to this was to say, well, I fired those people. You know, you didn't fire anyone who was bad from your administration. Like, I fired all these people who were bad from my.

administration. Now, that was probably one of his more effective responses to this goading, but it was still just more debate time being used of Trump talking about something that is not a strong issue for him and that his advisors clearly would not want him to be talking about. But it is one of these surefire ways to get a reaction from Trump. It's to talk about all the people who've written books about his administration. He can't stop talking about the books. And he was even And so no one's going to write books about your administration because you didn't fire anyone. Look, there may be a grain of truth to that. But once again, not a great thing for Trump to be talking about in the debate.

No, and it does also remind people of the kind of chaos and drama. And that was another part of her pitch. And it's a fascinating one to try and paint him as the incumbent and say, you know, or, you know, ex-incumbent. We're not going back. We're going to turn the page. We're going to move forwards. We know moving forward has almost become a. A cliche in political speak, and Julia Gillard really kind of killed it forever here in Australia.

But nevertheless, the notion of a fresh start is surely one of Kamala Harris's most potent prospects that she can dangle in front of the American people, even as she is the, you know, sitting vice president and part of the administration. Just a moment, David, we might play some ads and I'll just take for a brief refreshing meal of someone's pet and then more after this. The Chaser Report. less often. Look, we learned a lot about Kamala Harris,

and one of her challenges was to try and reveal more of herself. She clearly had lots of lines she wanted to bring about being in the middle class and sort of value that being raised by a small business owner and all this stuff that you could kind of tell moving into the scripted portion of her answer. I wasn't expecting her to reveal that she and Tim Walls, we knew Tim Walz was, but that she was also a gun owner. Yeah, this was one of the few surprising things that she said,

because nearly everything else that she said would have been familiar to anybody who'd seen her acceptance speech at the convention. Now, she needed to say it again because this debate potentially has a much bigger audience. But yeah, the one surprise was when Trump said you want to take away everyone's guns

and she said in this exasperated way, Tim Walls and I are both gun owners. We're not taking away anyone's guns. And it was a surprising thing. She apparently has said it before. She actually said this an interview in 2019. But it's not something that anyone has heard for a while. And it's probably a positive thing for her to emphasize when you get into gun control debates that, yeah, clearly she doesn't want to take away everyone's gun. She owns a gun for the same reason that a lot

of Americans do out of a sense of the need for personal protection. So she sympathizes with why people own guns and she doesn't want to take them all away. She just wants to engage. in some sensible form of gun control. Now, I wonder if we're going to see more of that being said on the campaign trail from this point, because I imagine that when they do their forensic breakdowns of how undecided voters responded to things that the candidates said, this probably would have been one of her high points in terms of being something that was unexpected, but that also gets us something in common with, you know,

people who might otherwise be considering voting with Trump. Okay, so also I guess, given her former job of being a prosecutor, you can see why she might fear reprisals. Perhaps that's what that's all about. But, look, it did seem as though after certainly a bit of a shaky start, she did have a strategy. It does feel as though she executed that strategy. And, I mean, Donald Trump had a lot of extreme statements.

We had all the, you know, the executing babies. Israel is going to disappear, apparently, if Kamala Harris is elected president and much of the Middle East. Yeah, within two years. He hopes it won't happen, but it will, apparently. It was an incredibly precise estimate, which is not what you usually get. By the midterms. Yeah, from Trump.

And what was amazing about that bit was he also at some point, you could see the gears working. He wanted to try to remind Arab American and Muslim American voters that they don't like Harrison Biden because he was saying, and she hates the Arab people too. She hates them too, because they're all going to die too. Everyone's going to die. It was, yeah, it was one of the more surreal moments of the debate. Yeah, no, it's really interesting. Now, look, the New York Times has a breakdown of how the candidates spent their time.

Donald Trump had five more minutes than Kamala Harris, probably because of his tendency to just keep talking and they turned the microphones back on, even though they kind of weren't supposed to. And she spent more time attacking him than vice versa. So, I mean, after all, the sound and fury, and it was a very combative debate, they both called each other weak repeatedly, and there seemed to be really no love lost. She did not seem intimidated by Donald Trump at all, and she seemed to get stuck in. Okay, she probably achieved more of what she wanted to achieve, but does this actually make much of a difference in this game of things in a very tight race? It might move the needle of a percentage or two, which might

be all that's needed. But, I mean, all of that energy, there certainly wasn't anything like a knockout blow either way. No, I don't think that there was. It, you know, it wasn't like the last debate, which was so decisive with one candidate to leave the race. Historically, presidential debates haven't moved the needle very much. It's really hard to tell. We are just not going to know until polls start appearing. At this point, I don't know how many people actually watch the debate. Of course, it's not just about the people who watch the debate on the night. It's what the campaigns then do with the sound bites afterwards. Can they really effectively make attack ads out of So it's just really impossible to tell.

I think that the Harris campaign would feel that they got everything that they needed out of this debate, that given that New York Times, Siena poll that we mentioned showing that people needed to know more about Harris, that she would have presented herself very well to those voters. So I think they'd probably feel that Harris did just about as well as she could have done. But, yeah, there's no guarantee that this is actually. going to move the polls at all. One of the things that I've noticed in polls

is that as the weeks go by, there are fewer and fewer undecided voters. And there may not be a huge number of them left at this point. Just going on my memories from last year, sorry, not from last year, from 2020 and 2016, I seem to remember at this point there were just far more undecided voters out there

and they just don't seem to be that many out there at this time. Harris in many ways was tailoring her message very narrowly to specific segments of undecided voters. She really seemed to be appealing to conservatives who might not like Trump. She was talking about the number of Republicans who have endorsed her. I think in any other context, it would be very weird to proudly claim the endorsement of Dick Cheney. Yes. Dick Cheney's on my team. Not one of the more popular figures. in America, but this is because she was going so narrowly after conservative voters who are thinking trying might just be a bit too far beyond the pale. So she was definitely trying

to ring the maximum impact out of this debate, whether or not that'll work, who knows. Okay. So she had a strategy, executed the strategy. Donald Trump did really seem to spend a lot of time ranting. There were certainly some effective attack lines. I feel across the, what I watched, there were certainly periods where he attacked Harris effectively about the kinds of issues that you think she might be relatively weak on, things like the economy and the border, and so on. Even though she booby-trapped a lot of those issues, as we've discussed, I still think he would be happy with some of these things.

He says it's his best performance in any debate ever. There's now talk of will. They have another one. Harris wants to. Trump isn't so sure because he says when you knock someone out, they always want to come back. But the Democrats seem pretty happy. One thing that did happen curiously right after the debate in an almost.

headline-grabbing way. It reminded me of the Grammys, really. Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris very effusively with a picture of her and her cat and signed Childless Cat Lady. So chalked that one up to the J.D. Vance account. Yeah. I mean, that endorsement is not that much of a surprise. Last time around, she also endorsed Joe Biden immediately after the

presidential debate. Nonetheless, they will be happy to get that endorsement. They need as many young voters as possible. If they're going to win this election, they're probably going to need higher than normal turnout from younger voters in the same way that Obama got them. And certainly that can't hurt. Once again, how much impact it's going to have, I don't know. Usually celebrity endorsements are most effective when they're surprising,

and this wasn't really surprising to anyone as well-timed as it was. So, you know, who knows? I think we're just going to continue to see a very close race. But all that said, David, finally, we know these things are decided. I know it's almost a cliche, but it's voters in swing states, and it's only some voters in swing states. The debate was held in Pennsylvania. Some appointed to this is the key swing state in everything. I'm not sure if that's still the way the polls are looking.

But in terms of, I guess, kind of micro-broadcasting or just kind of almost sub-tweeting the voters that she needs in the way that Tim Walz's selection as vice president seems very much a kind of targeted pitch to just a small quadrant of Americans who are going to actually decide these things. how does it look to you in terms of both what's needed and how things are travelling for both candidates in those swing states? Yeah, the swing state polling is even murkier than the national polling. The swing state polling in Pennsylvania is incredibly close. And this was why when the moderators asked Harris, they listed her flip-flops on a series of positions.

She said, I'm going to address all of those, but then just talked about bracking. So fracking is the big Pennsylvania issue. She even acknowledged that, didn't she? Yeah, it's a massive industry in Pennsylvania, and she in 2019 had been in favor of a ban on fracking for environmental reasons. In this debate, she pointed out that she supported fracking during the 2020 election, and she and Joe Biden hadn't ban fracking. In fact, U.S. fossil fuel output was as high as it has ever been. And during one of the very last questions of the debate where they asked about,

climate change well neither of them talked about climate change very much um so you know it was all about industry so that was really the once again kind of speaking directly to um you know to swing state issues that we've been hearing so much about so yeah a lot of micro targeting going on and i think it's just worth repeating harris was clearly very well prepared i don't want to subject jays report listeners to stories about our debating days once again. But, you know, preparation is the key to debating. Like, we all know that. It's whoever can make better use of their preparation time has an enormous advantage.

And she had clearly made great use of her preparation time. Trump with apparently his policy briefs with Tulsi Gabbard, not so much. Yeah. For those who followed the Tulsi Gabbard story, not shocking. Yes, no more talk about our. school debating days. That sort of level of granular detail, though, you'll find in the PEP podcast that Dave and Chaz do together. I will just say, finally, I don't know if I said finally, but a lot of people seem to be claiming it as, or hailing it as a win for Harris,

certainly. In the Australian press, that seems to be the view your colleague, Bruce Walpy, said Kamala sliced Trump like sashimi when he wasn't doing it himself. Yeah, that is quite an image of Trump slicing himself like sashimi. I actually have an image of can cut up, strangely. There are also a couple of American data points backing this. The famous CNN Insta poll has come out, which showed, so it's a poll of about 600 people. 63% thought that Harris had won, 37% thought Trump had won. To put that into perspective, after the Trump Biden debate, it was 67% thought Trump had won,

and 33% thought Biden had won. So for Trump, that's kind of an uncomfortably. similar result, even though I think most people would say he didn't do as badly as Biden. Washington Post was also doing these live updates where they were speaking to an audience of 24 swing state, but undecided swing state voters throughout. And their verdict at the end was 22 said that Harris had performed better and two said that Trump had performed better. So I think overall, it's quite hard to deny that it was a win for Harris. The Fox News, commentators were saying, oh, well, nobody won. Whenever someone says nobody won or it was a top,

that's a surefire sign that you've lost. The other surefire sign that you've lost is complaining about the moderation. Oh, yes. And there's a lot of that going on in right-wing commentary at the moment. Now, it's true. The moderators didn't fact-check Harris on some things that were probably quite fact-checkable, and they did fact-check Trump. But, you know, as we said, the things that they were fact-checking him on were so incredibly basic that they don't qualify as fact-checks at all. So there's complaining about the moderation. It's a sign that they lost. Yeah, well, as we know, of course, Donald Trump was up against three people on that stage. I must say I wish they'd dump the fact-checking. It's almost demeaning. Like, the things

that fact-checking was so obvious that it's just, you'd have to be a moron not to realize. But then again, when they don't do it, they get criticised too. All right, so no knockout blows. They'll probably go for it again, I suspect, given that things are still so tight. and maybe this time they'll leave the mics on for a true. Shemuzzle, thank you, David. We'll catch you on PEP. My pleasure. There you go.

Pep with Chaz and Dr. Dave, who's actually associate professor, Dave, but, you know, all good. Find that in your podcast feed and settle in for three hours at a stretch. Our gear is remote, we're part of the Iconiclass Network, and we'll catch you next time.