The Press Box - Instant Reactions to the Kamala Harris–Donald Trump Debate With Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan grabs his coffee and fires up the mic with Benjy Sarlin so they can provide you with the morning-after immediate reactions to the Kamala Harris–Donald Trump debate. They discuss the following: The biggest things everyone learned from the debate (1:10) How close did we get to seeing Kamala Harris the prosecutor (8:51) How Kamala Harris was prepared for the debate (12:24) Things that connected with undecided voters (16:00) Words that will be remembered out of this debate (22:58) Their thoughts on the moderators (25:25) Reactions to Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris (30:56) Benjy shares insight from the spin room in Philadelphia (33:18) Plus David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Benjy Sarlin Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Tara Palmeri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent and host of Somebody's Got to win. Brought to you by The Ringer and Spotify. The 2024 election has been upended with Joe Biden off the ticket and Donald Trump facing a new challenger, Kamala Harris. If you want to hear what the insiders are really saying about the race, join me Tuesdays and Thursdays as I break it all down with lawmakers, journalists, and political strategists. We'll go deeper than the headlines to the anxieties at the highest levels of power. And of course, we'll chew over all the hot political gossip as we head into this historic election. Be sure to follow. Somebody's got to win at Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers.

Welcome to Pressbox, Brian Curtis of the Ringer here along with producer Brian Waters. Joining us bright and early to pick through last night's historic debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is our pal Benji Sarlane, semaphores Washington Bureau Chief, our official politics reactor, Benji, welcome back to the press box. Brian, so good to be here. What's the biggest thing we learned last night? Kamala Harris is, she means business. I mean, I think the big thing was that Kamala Harris had enormous expectations. I think there was a lot of uncertainty around how she would perform,

given that she had done so few interviews in the lead-up and had tackled some of the kind of tougher questions surrounding her campaign in a way that could give everyone clear confidence on how she do. But she showed up extremely prepared with an obvious plan to bait Donald Trump into being as Trumpy as possible while presenting herself as a credible alternative. And I think the consensus, the next pretty much immediately afterwards is that she succeeded in that. Now, whether it affects, you know, who wins the election, that's a more complicated question we'll get into later. but I don't think there's any doubt who won this debate on the points and who's celebrating the next day. You mentioned the word bait.

That was the word of the night. That's bait, as the Fury Road meme says. What did you make of the way she chum the water? So what's so interesting about this is that it's the most telegraphed play of all time, which is politicians who've run against Trump are always saying this. Like the famous Hillary Clinton line was like a man you can bait with a tweet is not someone you should trust with nuclear weapons. And in the run-up to this debate, there was all this discussion from Democrats openly of like, oh, yeah, we're studying all these things to bait Trump. We're going to

throw him off his game. He won't be able to take it. So to set up this scenario here, Donald Trump is walking into this debate, knowing that his opponent and all her allies are bragging about how they're going to get him to go off his own game plan by throwing some predictable stuff that he's heard a million times before Adam. So here's how it worked in practice. This is why everyone was talking about this. Kamalares did get some tough questions in that debate. And every time she was on a topic that was somewhat difficult for her, she included something that predictably would enrage Donald Trump. And so the big example that everyone's going to get into is that is going to replay the most today, I think, was about crowd sizes. Where she had, there was a question she was getting.

and she pivoted to, I think it was about, it was the immigration pets exchange, right? Is that the one that triggered it? It's definitely about immigration, yes. Yes. And this is, you know, her most difficult topic in theory. It's one that polls show Trump has an advantage on. He has tried really hard to force Kamala Harris to brand her as the borders are, as the saying was early in the presidency, to make her account for the Biden administration's record

and to show that he'd be stronger on this. So Kamala Harris gets a tough question on the Biden administration's, record, and she starts talking about how Donald Trump's crowds get bored and leave his rallies. And Donald Trump, this is his big moment on his best topic to rebut Harris, make the case for his record, say that she's lying, and this is what she actually did, and instead starts taking the bait, as they say, and going on about crowd sizes and her crowd sizes aren't good and they're not real, and then getting on, once thrown off there, getting into a real tank. tangent on this strange Ohio pet's hoax, which was going around that day and is really not

the core case, to put it mildly, that they have against Kamala Harris on the border, some passing viral news cycle that's not even true. And this happened again repeatedly. You know, she got tough questions on flip-flops, for example. There was a question about how she has, you know, changed her positions. This is one of the toughest, one of the toughest question she has. Why is she changed on fracking, for example? And what does she do? She starts talking about how Donald Trump inherited money from his father and shouldn't be credited for making all those billions. This is, again, the big moment that Donald Trump has to finally fact checker. The thing that they have been doing is on every ad here in Pennsylvania nonstop. Kamala Harris is lying. She's a

dangerous liberal. Look at all this old footage of her saying all these liberal things in 2019. And instead of being able to point by point rebut her, Donald Trump started going on about all the money he made and actually he inherited only some millions from his father, but not $400 million. And this was just, it was so wild to watch such an obviously teed-up strategy work as intended so clearly when Donald Trump has been around so long. But that's what happened. And it's what everyone was talking about after the debates on the networks in the spin room. It really just came up over and over again afterwards. It's so strange when you can say, here is our plan to get Donald Trump off message. Okay, now we are doing the plan. We are doing

the plan in real time and then Donald Trump just gets off message. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, the message they're trying to drive home there is that like the guy can't help himself. You are not getting a new Trump. Trump's 78. He's always going to. going to be Trump. And the interesting thing is that when Trump had these kinds of digressions, you know, like the pet stuff, for example, but, you know, generally just yelling out attacks, you know, getting flustered more, especially in the second half of the debate when he was sort of more fired up. Kamala Harris kept pivoting back to this idea of turning the page, being like, look at this, you know this. It's completely familiar. You've seen this guy do this for 10 years.

There's another way. I thought that was very very. very interesting. Again, it fit into a clear plan. This did not feel, for example, like, I mean, it felt like Trump was the incumbent watching this debate, that he was the angry one kind of accounting for his record. And Kamala Harris was the one free to be the challenger and say, I have a new path forward. I'm a breath of fresh air. I'm the change candidate. And this is the one thing that has been driving Republicans crazy and that they've been trying to counter for the whole last few weeks, which is, no, you're the incumbent. You are the incumbent vice president.

We are debating your record as vice president, which is also President Biden's record. Donald Trump is not in office. And yet they could not seem to get it to that frame the entire time. It was such an interesting sub-theme of the night. And you saw Trump in his closing statement, finally get there, finally use that direct language.

He said she's been there for three and a half years. They've had three and a half years to fix the border. They've had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn't she? done it. But it was at the end of the debate. After, as you say, she had portrayed herself as the change candidate as the fresh voice, as turned the page, and him, him, same old tired playbook, going back to the past, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, in the end of the day, the debate is traditionally

part no one is paying much attention to, just to be clear here also. It's like, yeah, I mean, in terms of like pundit reactions and, you know, in the snap polls that determine who won a debate, people are usually paying attention much more to the beginning. I mean, it's not strictly true. Some of the most famous debate lines happen further in. But usually by the time you get to the very end, viewers are less likely to be watching live. Reporters have already started prewriting what they're going to file. They're already running over to the spin room to hear from Republicans and Democrats. That's not where you unleash your big hits. You do it in the very beginning. A couple of weeks ago, you and I were sitting outside the United Center in Chicago right after Kamala Harris's big speech. And you told me what Democrats hope to see in a debate setting is Kamala Harris, the prosecutor. How close did we get to Harris the prosecutor last night? This was 100% prosecutor, Kamala Harris. It was almost identical to the version of her we saw in her DNC speech, which says it was very methodically presenting a case point by point with example by example, trying to lead

voters to a conclusion about Donald Trump. And, you know, the knock on this you might hear is that it was canned. It was prepared. And I'm sure we're going to hear some of that criticisms from Republicans. Trump speaks on his feet. He doesn't need to memorize some line. Kamala Harris clearly treated this like a courtroom case. And, you know, we'll see what that reaction is like. But it also is clearly very true to her style. I mean, this is a prosecutor. And this was the approach she was taking. So I think in terms of, you know, just getting this in on her own terms, yeah, she approached this like a prosecutor. And I think it went about as well as she could expect on that basis. CNN's Laura Coates, who is herself an attorney, had a really interesting point last night because she said being a prosecutor, it's not just about prosecuting the case methodically going point by point and taking Trump's positions apart.

It's also about knowing that everything you do in a courtroom is going to be observed by the jury. every gesture, right, starting last night with Kamala Harris walking across the stage and putting out her hand and saying, I'm Kamala Harris. I want to shake your hand, right? I am not scared of you. I'm not worried about you, you Democratic boogeyman now of, you know, a decade plus. There was so much of that with her reactions to the way she looked at Trump every time he talked. He explicitly declined to look at her for almost the entire night. You could feel that too, right, Benji. It's not just, I have these answers. I'm ready to go, but the style, right? My courtroom style is very apparent to anybody watching. And it was very interesting what she kind of

chose to do with that, as you mentioned, knowing that the cameras were on her. Like, there was a lot of attention, as there always is in debates, that split screen of how candidates are reacting to each other. And she had a pretty constant kind of stance towards Trump after that kind of, you know, power move handshake at the beginning, which is this kind of like often mocking, bemused look of like, can you believe what you're hearing kind of look? And that was interesting. And it's not the way everyone would have gone against Trump. You could have looked like, you know, I'm enraged that this person is doing this. Or I am so sorrowful for, you know, I'm so sad for our democracy. Like, we've seen people kind of take very different tones to Trump. They've really been

leaning into this idea of that this is a small, ridiculous person, as she said in the DNC, not a serious man, but, you know, a serious threat. She was very much trying to convey that again last night in her body language. And I thought that was one of the more interesting choices as well. Did you think shaking her head at Trump was more effective than Biden looking at Trump with his mouth open during the first debate? Yeah. I mean, I think generally speaking strategists would recommend that, not looking just kind of dazed with your mouth agape as opposed to looking like you have him in the palm of your hand and you're executing a focused strategy. But, you know, opinions differ on these things. Opinions are different. There are people who would go with the Biden plan.

You know, when you talk about her prep and having things ready to go, I mean, to me, the moment that I, you know, really, really noticed it last night was when they were talking about Ukraine and Putin. And if you give Ukraine to Putin, he's going to be on the doorstep of. Poland and she goes to this line, why don't you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania? Like, whoa, there is retail politics and then there is retail politics, baby. Yeah, and that was the other side to this debate, which was, and to the extent it had some more kind of disjointed moments. I think it's when things like this were happening for Harris, which was on the one hand, she had this kind of main debate strategy that was clear, which was bait Donald

Trump use that to help sidestep some of the tougher questions for her, which worked, and then use Trump's answers to reinforce what people already don't like about Donald Trump and off-ramp. But then there was like these kind of side quests, you might say, which were kind of canned little riffs that she really wanted to get in at some point because they know they're important with this or that group of voters. So the other one that really stood out that was like a little disjointed in the moment, but you could see exactly why she was doing it was discussing racism and some of Donald Trump's, you know, more race-vading attacks. She started off with this answer, it's towards the end, you know, it's pretty near the end.

She started off with this answer in which she was talking about how Donald Trump is very divisive on this issue. People are tired of it. And it seemed like what she was setting up is, and therefore I'm not going to talk about this more. Let's just move on to something else. Instead, she went into this extremely extended riff on the greatest hits of Trump being racist, going all the way back to the 70s with housing discrimination cases against the Trump family, going on to go over the details of the Central Park Five, who were, by the way, at the Democratic National Convention. All of this was very familiar to me. They are clearly worried about their position, especially with black men at the moment. And they've been trying very hard to remind voters

who maybe have not seen something recently that makes them think Trump is racist, why he's had that reputation in the past and why he did not do well with those voters in the past, why they were reluctant to vote for him before. And you know, it's funny, relevant to the ringer here, our own Kadiagoba, you know, interviewed Donald Trump for a piece on his relationship with all these black athletes from the 1980s, superstars, you know, like Mike Tyson, Lawrence Taylor, Daryl, who he still talks to, and I think really inform his worldview, honestly, when it comes to these topics. And one of the things, as part of it, Kadea interviewed Mike Tyson. And he mentioned that the Central Park Five story has been one of his biggest barriers to getting

other black celebrities to say they support Trump. That that's a bridge too far for them. That is really stuck. That is something that people have not forgotten. And that that's been a major barrier. So there's a reason she's mentioning it, you know, even if it's kind of disjointed with this previous point she made about wanting to not get into these topics. Yeah, the contrast with what she told Dana Bash in that CNN interview, not that long ago, was very, very striking last night. You mentioned how there's always two scoreboards after a presidential debate. There are the things from the debate that make the MSNBC panel light up like a pinball machine. And then there are things that actually connect with voters who are undecided or who are considering Harris and just need a nudge, need permission to use another word we've heard a lot lately.

What do you think cut through from the second category last night? So the area where I think they probably did the best was presenting Harris as a credible president. This is someone who looks the part of a traditional TV president who, after being told for weeks by Donald Trump and by his allies, that she's weak, that she'll wilt under pressure, that it's all, you know, only works if you're in a speech with a teleprompter that she can't think on her feet. Trump outright says she's dumb all the time. I mean, it's like that she literally is not mentally capable of being president here. This is someone who looked very sharp, who looked in command of the facts, who did not seem easily flustered, who did not seem nervous. That's all very helpful, I'm sure, in establishing some baseline of credibility. What you did not see, which came up in a lot of the previews of how Harris might handle this, is that there was some but less

emphasis on I'm Kamala Harris, you may not know me that well. Here's a little about my biography, here's a little about the specifics of my economic plans, and how they will help you with the cost of living, how they will help you with grocery prices, how they will help you with housing. Her opening answer was on some of that. But in general, this was a debate much more focused on showing she can stand up to Trump than, as a lot of people recommended she do before the debate instead of trying to ignore Trump more and instead focus on her own agenda and filling in the gaps undecided voters might have about her own background. So I think that was an interesting choice.

And I'm sure there's going to be some discussion today of whether that was the right choice and people are going to be parsing polls over there. But that was based on a lot of polls and focus groups recently that have been showing a barrier to supporting Harris is that they still are unsure of her. worldview and her agenda. And so... Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting one. You mentioned, you know, right off the top, she says, I was raised a middle class kid,

something she said repeatedly in speeches. She says that right off the top. She did use the word plan a lot without getting too deeply into those plans. I have a plan. I have a plan. I have a plan. I think she used the word plan five times in her first answer about the economy. Also saying things like Donald Trump has no plan for you.

And then once again, he helpfully. cooperated with the Harris strategy by using the phrase concepts of a plan when talking about health care, which will be one of the memorable phrases from this debate. So she was nodding at it, right? But again, if we're just talking about voters who are thinking about what to do, who may not be thinking about issues or haven't thought about issues that deeply this far into the process, maybe just standing, going toe to toe with him, as they say, standing next to him, being presidential while he looks angry is more helpful to her. I don't know.

It's an interesting calculation on their part. Yeah, and I would add that there is some benefit to leaning into a candidate's strengths and what is perhaps more authentic to who they are. And Kamala Harris has never been Elizabeth Warren. If you had Elizabeth Warren up on that stage, it might make sense for her to go into detail on all these policies she supports that are, she thinks will be popular with people and that she has good anecdotes and data to explain and as she can point out how the other side's policies are really, you know, just fundamentally flawed and she knows all these facts she can cite about it.

Elizabeth Warren's great at that. That hasn't been Kamala Harris's strength as much. Harris's strength has been what we talked about, being this relentless prosecutor. And so I do think it's possible that, you know, while Democrats might prefer a another approach. Sometimes it's beneficial just to go for what is the candidate's true strength. Did Trump do anything well last night? I don't think this was his worst debate ever, to be clear. Especially early on, I thought he was fairly restrained and focused for him. I think, I don't think this was like, this wasn't like the Biden debate, for example,

where in the first 30 seconds, it was clear that like things were going off the rails and people were texting, like, oh, my God, what a disaster. With Trump, it was more, it wasn't like there was one knockout punch exactly. It was more just kind of a series of missed opportunities and kind of just taking a lot of body blows. I don't think he had like one particular meltdown. The pets thing, I think, is the closest of something that's just going to be like replayed a lot as emblematic of this debate. but in general their plan of trying to keep him from going too far off the rails with personal attacks, with just raising his voice and shouting, there was a little bit of that.

But it never got as extreme as, for example, his first debate with Joe Biden in 2020, where he was just absolutely going off. It's the reason we had this whole muted Mike's conversation in the first place is that he was just so relentless and wild out the gate. So, you know, he got in some of his attacks. I think they were just not in their best form. It's not like he didn't attack Kamala Harris on the border or on some of the left-wing positions he's taken, on her prior calls to ban fracking, for example, on, you know, tying her to the administration.

It's that they weren't the most effective versions of those attacks. They were kind of jumbled. They would often just be kind of like hinting at some concept you would know if you follow conservative media, but not really explaining it to, this is a constant, this is a constant Trump problem, by the way, this is not new. But like hinting at something that you would know if you watch Fox News 24-7, but would not know otherwise, rather than the way Harris did, if you are an undecided voter who does not follow politics that well or has, you know, only like kind of a vague impression of what's been going on lately, given them all the facts they need right there to form an

impression. So it was more like Donald Trump didn't do the best job he could than it was like some complete utter meltdown to be clear. That's more how I kind of viewed it. He gets lost in Mac at Twitter a lot. I mean, that whole riff on Victor Orban last night and you're sitting there going, who is this for? Who is the Victor Orban swing voter? Like, who is the I was thinking about voting for Donald Trump, but I really want to hear if he's validated by like the authoritarian leader of Hungary. It's just very, you have. You have. to really be deep in the JD Vance. JD Vance as ex-feed.

Somebody tweeted last night as a pro-orban Swifty. I'm having kind of a tough night, which I thought was a fantastic tweet. We always have little words and phrases that come out of debate. I mentioned concepts of a plan. When Trump said, I have been a leader

on IVF, which is fertilization. I happen to be taking a bite of rice noodles and almost spit them out at that point. Trump on his former staffer said, because with me they can write books, sort of bragging about how he as a president had produced bestsellers by people who were saying

he was a bad and out-of-control president. And then, of course, favorite of all the press box listeners that sent it to me using the phrase of Venezuela on steroids. Any other little moments, words and phrases that jumped out to you? You mentioned fertilization, but also related, the entire abortion exchange is the one that I think, is going to be clipped and put in Harris ads right away. This is the biggest thing that was driving Democrats insane about Joe Biden,

not just in that debate that knocked him out of the race, but in general, which is that he just could not give a focused, compelling case on what they thought was their strongest issue, which was these abortion bans and Trump's role in it. Kamala Harris nailed all of this. She went through the policy. She gave a clear explanation of how Trump's judges got us to this point, which he takes credit for.

She went over the very human cost of this, how people are being denied potentially life-saving care because doctors are afraid of being prosecuted. She made him account for his record, all in stuff that you can clip that you can use later in ads. But to mention the things that stick out, Trump was surprisingly all over the map. I say surprisingly because this is a topic

where he clearly has been very worried about and has given some thought to his positioning, which is why it was so strained. that he seemed so unprepared almost for some obvious questions. One of the big ones was about, would you sign or veto a national abortion ban, where he suddenly was hedging even after J.D. Vance, who by the way, is much more, you would consider much more anti-abortion than Trump typically, had already said that he would veto it. He actually distanced himself from J.D. Vance and said, like, well, that's J.D. Vance's

thinking. That's amazing moment. He just seemed completely unsure how to handle the topic. which is, again, like, what Democrats and Republicans pretty much agree is, like, his weakest spot. So that's an exchange that could also live on a little bit, him just hedging on some of those really tough questions. I want to ask you about the moderators. David Muir of ABC began the debate by flubbing the very first question, saying Vice President Harris, you and President Trump were elected four years ago. But if you read liberal Twitter, Benji, after that mirror had a comeback worthy of the 2004 Red Sox,

what did you make of the moderators last night? Well, it's interesting. There's a lot of different ways to moderate a debate. Sometimes, like we saw in the CNN debate, you kind of just take the big, broadest topics and then just say go. So obviously no one remembers what the moderators did in the CNN debate between Biden and Trump, because Biden was the story. But there is mostly like grocery prices.

People say they're concerned about grocery prices. Go, like one minute each. Another approach we've seen in prior debates is to treat it as like a hard interview. Like, I'm going to give you a really tough, specific question and ask lots of follow-offs, and it's going to be like a joint interview almost. This was a little in between, and it was also let them talk to each other a lot more. Like, the moderators often kind of took themselves. I know there's going to be a lot of talk about the moments they did kind of put themselves into this with fact checks, which we'll get into.

but they often let them go back and forth for pretty extended periods. Just kind of let Harrison Trump cook. For all this talk about muted microphones and them being clipped, they were allowed to have a lot of pretty in-depth exchanges in which the moderators decided to hold off on interrupting them with a question and instead just see where things took them. In that sense, it reminded me of the Lester Holtz debates between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016, where a lot of the time they just didn't ask a question for a long period because it was so compelling watching the back and forth between Clinton and Trump.

And why interrupt that, you know, if it seems to be producing good television and interesting answers and they're bringing up relevant topics themselves. So I think they were doing that a little bit. But the thing obviously that every republic was talking about during the debate and afterwards was it was two things. One was the fact checks. There were three. They fact-check Donald Trump on the election lies, which I've got to say if you're complaining about that now, this is just something you know is going to happen every time in every interview and every debate. It's just standard. Right.

And he is lying about the election. So a fact-check sense. Yes, he is why, and the scale of it is so important that it's like there's no way he's going to get away with that. The other moment was the Ohio Pets topic, which I don't know. I feel like if you're doing a blood libel against an entire ethnic group based on a viral hoax, maybe it does stand to merit that maybe you should just point out that there's no evidence for this. It's a pretty extreme claim that would have been really even just a few years ago, even among Republicans probably dismissed as out of bounds and seeming kind of bigoted.

That didn't seem so wild to me. And then the other one was on abortion with the idea of like states allowing babies to be born and then executed, which is something Donald Trump's been saying for years. He's been getting fact checked on for years. I don't think it's so surprising there was a very brief fact check on that given what Trump has been trained to expect from interviews and debates. The other area where they were criticized, which might be a little more valid, I think, is that on some of Trump's tougher topics, there was more of like a follow-up, but to be clear,

like, would you veto this bill? You know, to be clear, like, what was your stance? Would you sign a national abortion ban? That was another follow. Yes, exactly. Like on the topic of the abortion ban. With Harris, where she has some of her tougher topics, which is especially on her flip-flops, maybe a little less of the, you know, no.

But to be clear, like, yes or no, why did you change that? You know, like, you know, it's like, yes or no, is this still your position, this thing you said in a, you know, candidate questionnaire years ago? Or, you know, please, but explain why you change your mind. How can we trust you now if you change your mind? Like, there wasn't that kind of point. question. So I got that a little bit. But in general, if you are spending the time after a debate primarily complaining about the moderators, it's usually not the winning side that is doing that.

And this was, it seemed like a pretty predictable pivot from not having too much to celebrate about the debate. It felt like a pivot to from the first debate in this cycle, the Biden-Trump debate. I mean, I felt like what ABC was doing, and I should mention Lindsay Davis was there with David Muir was correcting for a lot of the criticisms of Jake Tapper and Dana Bash the first time out. You mentioned real-time fact-checking. They didn't do that at the CNN debate. And the questions I thought were just generally sharper last night. It wasn't, as you say, just like, Ukraine. What do you think? It was, do you want Ukraine to win this war? Which is a very valid question and also a valid policy question if Donald Trump gets elected, right? Like, do you want

Ukraine to win this war? Like, I thought the questions were just generally sharper. last night. And I felt again like they were thinking they had watched that first debate, what worked, what didn't leaned into a lot of changes. And I thought that was interesting last night. Benji, I know I brought you on specifically to talk about Taylor Swift.

Because moments after the debate, we had an amazing television couple of minutes of TV where Rachel Maddow had Tim Walls on. And not only did she get to inform Tim Walls that Taylor Swift had just endorsed Harrison Walls. She insisted in her very Rachel Maddow way of reading the entire Instagram post, which was actually quite long,

including the preamble about AI. Well, Tim Walls sat there expectingly like, is she going to endorse this? Like, what's coming? He apparently did not know that this had happened. What should we make of Taylor Swift finally getting off the sidelines and endorsing Harris? Well, I can't remember the last time a pop culture figures endorsement was this discussed for this long? I mean, there were like, I remember it was like a year or two years ago, how long ago was it? There were like, every so often you would have viral rumors go around on the right that Taylor Swift was going to endorse Biden and that it was like all part of some conspiracy off or something. There was this whole conspiracy going around Taylor Swift dating Travis Kelsey and like, you know, even there were even jokes about how like the Super Bowl was rigged just to set up the Taylor Swift endorsement for Biden at the time.

So it's been this like absolute focus of rage and corners of the right. And then as Taylor Swift mentioned in her Instagram post, it got exacerbated by the fact that Donald Trump was sharing like AI disinformation almost seems too strong because it was so obviously AI generated. But like trolling the idea that Taylor Swift and her fans are supporting Donald Trump, like, you know, making some kind of trolling joke about it at least. obviously it's a big endorsement. I know, yes, yes, musicians, their endorsements don't matter. People care about what real Americans think about these issues. But she has a lot of reach. She has hundreds of millions of followers on social media.

Everything she says gets reported on. If she shows up in a Kamala Harris T-shirt, that's going to make news. If she shares Kamala Harris content on her social media, that spreads its reach to people who would not otherwise. see it. I don't know how many undecided voters she moves or brings off the fence, but still, it's good vibes for your campaign. You have

at this moment, probably the most famous person in the world, strongly endorsed your campaign. So obviously good news for her there. A couple of quick ones for you. You were on the scene in Philly. You were in the spin room last night after the debate. What happened in the spin room

that was fun or interesting? So this was the question. everyone was getting asked in both parties. There were two. One was, wow, do you see Kamala Harris bait Donald Trump? Did the baiting work? What did you think of the baiting?

Did Donald Trump take the bait too much? Was Kamala Harris, like, how did she come up with his bait strategy? Like, that was what everyone was just like yelling at everyone. I talked to Byron Donald's, the Florida Congressman is a Trump supporter. At one point, like, his spin on it was that, like, Kamal Harris was more focused on getting under Trump's skin than talking about issues that matter to the American people and her policies. So they were already coming out there with some inkling that this was going to be, you know, a theme of this.

But the other question that was getting asked was, will there be another debate, which is an open question? You know, Trump initially requested multiple ones. Harris didn't immediately agree. She said she would go debate by debate. That was before this debate, I'm saying. But after this debate, Democrats were feeling great. the Harris campaign immediately indicated that they would be up for another debate in October.

Every Democrat who was coming out was pretty much saying the same thing. And there was an interesting split on the Republican side, which also, I think, affects a little on how this debate is going to be discussed afterwards, which was the Republicans we talked to, including people who are affiliated with the Trump campaign, were saying, absolutely, like we were the ones pushing for more debates before. Of course we'll do another debate. Then Trump personally comes out to the spin room, which is honestly kind of unusual. and says he's not so sure, and has been repeating that since.

He was repeating it on Fox News this morning as well on Fox and Friends. So the ball is really in his court at this point on this fairly big day two story, which is, is this the last debate? And obviously that affects how people perceive how it went. I mean, generally speaking, if you had a great debate and think you put Harris on the defensive and helped yourself, you probably would assume you are asking for another debate closer to the actual election day when people are voting in greater numbers. But now we are set up into, I know this is something that also happens with every debate,

yet another long cycle of like, will he or won't he, you know, decide to debate Connell Harris again in what circumstances? And will the mics be muted or unmuted once again? I mean, Trump's logic last night with Sean Hannity was she's only asking for another debate because she lost this one. Meanwhile, he was saying that from the spin room and then the other law of politics is if you, the candidate for president, have wandered into the spin room to make other headlines.

It's probably kind of a tough night. It does go binge you to the bigger question about the Harris team, which is how much are they going to put her out there? You know, they have this vulnerability that you mentioned earlier, which is people feel like they're still getting to know her and what she stands for. So do they try to bridge that gap through commercials

and Twitter videos and podcast interviews like the Biden strategy before his candidacy ended, or do they say, let's do another debate, put her out there for lots of news interviews, that will be a very, very interesting thing to look at as we go forward here. Yeah, it's really one of the biggest questions now, is now that the two major things

that you really need to prepare for out of the way, which was the convention and the first debate, now that she's more free to get out there, where does that energy go? Do you do more media and do what kind of, of media in addition to rallies. And I think that's an interesting open question. I mean, one reason why I don't think everyone was so sure Kamala Harris would have such

a strong night is that, you know, her CNN interview was okay, but it wasn't like, great. I'd say it was obviously not an easy interview because she had to deal with all the pent-up questions, you know, that had arose since the start of her surprise nomination. And obviously that means you're going to have some tough questions and some tough follow-up. But, you know, she seemed a little more, got into some of her habits from her 2020 run that were recognizable, which was, again, not especially bad, not especially damaging. Nothing from that interview really stuck around afterwards. But being a little more defensive, being a little more nervous, being a little more lawyerly in some of her responses and over talking through them rather than giving the quick, crisp, you know, answer to something. this was all recognizable stuff from her 20-20-run that she was, you know,

as always had to deal with a bit. On the other hand, this debate, she looked extremely confident. She looked great. If you can harness that Harris, and why not get it into interviews? You know, if they figured out how they've cracked the code on how to deal with some of these tougher questions on, for example, or changing her positions, yeah, like why not go out and start talking to people, especially because, as we're talking media strategy, there's really a limit on what you can do with ads here. I mean, I'm sitting here in a hotel in Philly.

I've watched, you know, a whole lot of TV and YouTube. Like, we are at the absolute maximum saturation of ad spending for both sides. And at a certain point, people kind of just like, it's the marginal value of those ads. It's harder to really break through with them. Because people have just seen them for weeks, and they're just really over the top. And there starts to be more value to maybe showing up on that podcast you listen to, like you mentioned, or showing up on the morning show. Who knows?

Maybe do a cooking segment. It's not like it all has to be like hard news, just getting into another news environment rather than just an ad. And then there's all sorts of possibilities that you can do there. People have already been talking about getting Tim Walls out to more sports stuff. Why can't he go do Barstool sports or ESPN or go do the local football radio show in every swing state possible and show. up at the games. That's one possible route for him. But I do think they are starting to get to the

point where I think they can more comfortably get them out into interviews. They were already quietly starting to have Harrison Walls do some local and ethnic media in the run-up to the debate. Harris did one with a Spanish radio station. Tim Walls did a couple of local radio interviews and Tim Walls also was on ABC last night so he's also now being brought out their cracking seal on that too you know he can go out take some questions I think it'll be interesting how much they do that now that the debate's over all right Benji Sarlin he is our official politics reactor read him and the gang over at Semaphore we'll talk to you Benji after Tim Walz and J.D. VanSquare off on October 1st thanks as always for coming on the

press box thank you rod All right, it's time for the second weekly edition of David Shoemaker guesses, the strained pun headline. Yeah, great debate, great debate. Monday's headline. That's your take on all of Tuesday, great debate. That's all you got. Yeah, you and Benji did such a good job covering.

Monday's headline. Atop a story about getting rid of the penny was Stop Making Sense. Today's headline comes to us from Philip Sanford. It's from the Toledo Blade. I think the Blade's first appearance here on David Shoemaker, I guess this is a strain pun headline. I'll give you the rest of the Blades tweet here, David. A sinkhole apparently caused by a sewer collapse

closed part of westbound Washington Street late Tuesday morning. Fun little local story there. What was the Toledo Blades strained pun headline? Give it to me one more time? A sinkhole apparently... Oh, sinkhole. apparently caused by a sewer collapse, et cetera,

et cetera. Sunk cost, sunk? Is the delay what we're going for here besides the sinkhole? No, we're going for the sinkhole. The sinking feeling, a sinking. Now where is this particular event happening?

Ohio, Toledo, whole H-O-L-E-Y-Tolito? There we go. Boom. Holy. Toledo. Yeah, that's great. That is the press box.

I'm Brian Curtis, but I see a magic by Brian Waters. As long as we're talking politics, why don't you come join us next Thursday, September 19th? Because Sean Fennacy is going to be on this podcast and we are going to do a rundown of best campaign movies.

Best campaign movies. I'm going to be watched them all week. Hit me up at the press box pot if you've got any nominees because I would love to hear them. And, and one more thing, I just put in an order for another batch of Pressbox

2024 campaign buttons. I've sent a bunch out to listeners. I've got envelopes ready to go for you, Mark, and Philip. All you've got to do to get one of these coveted buttons is to make a meaningful contribution to this here media podcast.

A great headline, a Twitter joke, a good idea for a segment or guest. I am all ears, again, at the press box, Pot. Hit me up. One of these buttons could be yours. Shoemaker is going to return Monday. We will have many, many more takes on the first Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate. Plus, of course, more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a great rest of the week and a great week.