Coffee House Shots
Trump vs Harris debate: who won?
Subscribe to The Spectator in September and get three months of website and app access absolutely free. Follow the Tory leadership campaign, Labor's inaugural budget, and the US elections with Britain's best informed journalists. And get your first three months free. Only in September. Go to www.spectator.co.uk/sail24. Hello and welcome to Coffee had shots, The Spectators Daily Politics podcast. I'm Katie Bawles and I'm joined by Kate Andrews and John McTandon. Now we just had I suppose the second US presidential debate, but it was really the first. And when it comes to the new Democrat nominee, Kamana Harris, this time against Donald Trump. Last time around of course, the debate went so badly for the Democrats that Joe Biden exited the race. But this time, it was a little bit tighter. Actually, Donald Trump seemed to be the one suffering in places. Let's just hear a few clips before we get there now, says. So first off, the highlights we could say I think from both candidates. I was at the Capitol on January 6th. I was the vice president elect. I was also an acting senator. I was there. And on that day, the president of the United States incited a violent mob to attack our nation's capital to desecrate our nation's capital on that day 140 law enforcement officers were injured. And some died and understand the former president has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason. And policies like they have, I don't say her because she has no policy. Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window. She's going to my philosophy now. In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat. She's gone to my philosophy. But if she ever got elected, she'd change it. And I think secondly that's down here. Some of the areas where Trump has been criticized the most country 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. Kate, I'll come to you first. Do you think there was a clear winner there? Well, the snap reactions instant polls suggest that Kamala Harris did indeed win this debate. Going into it, I thought they both had fairly simple, but for them, fairly tricky tasks. For Donald Trump, it was to not take the bait. It was to simply stay calm and to stay on message. He is not empowered. He is attacking the record of the past three and a half years, which many Americans agree with him has not been all that great, especially when it comes to the economy, that the headline growth figures never really impacted them the way that the Biden and Harris administration said they did. He just needed to stay calm. For Kamala Harris, she needed to have moments of looking much more moderate in her economic and ideological philosophies. And she needed some good responses to the fact that she has held some of the most left wing views of Democratic senators, not 25 years ago, but five years ago and how she's managed to hold just about every political view that you can in the book. Kamala Harris never had to do the latter. She was never really confronted with that because Donald Trump could not get his act together. He did take the bait. He couldn't help himself and Harris was very clever. And when she kind of threw in the bait and it started early during the immigration portion when Donald Trump should have been hounding Kamala Harris about her job at the US Mexico border, about why that had been such a disaster, about how the administration still hasn't got it under control. And she mentioned that his rallies weren't that well attended and that people leave early. And you would have thought that the segment was about the size of Donald Trump's rallies. It became about Donald Trump, became about defending Donald Trump, that became about stroking the ego of Donald Trump. And she was able to forego basically all scrutiny. Donald Trump managed to land a few blows on her. And there was an interesting moment when he called her a Marxist because some nervous giggling on her part that she's become rather famous or started to come out. And she probably could have pushed the moderators to come back on that point. And she didn't. I don't think she wanted to open up the debate about previous policies that she has promoted, like the Green New Deal overhauling the US economy to the tune of $10 trillion. I don't think wanted to talk about how much she advocated for a single payer system when Bernie Sanders was pushing for it in 2019. I think she really wanted to stick to the more moderate points and Trump tried to hit on some of them, but it was never terribly coherent because he was distracted. He didn't seem to take the debate as seriously as he took the one against Biden, which is curious. And he kept wanting to bring up Joe Biden, which says to me that he and his team have still not quite figured out how you go after and debate Kamala Harris. I think a lot of people watching this to have no particular love for either candidate think that she is a vulnerable candidate. Do not think last night needed to be as good for her as it was. But she held it together and and he really struggled to. And I think that was quite clear in the delivery of what they were saying, what viewers were watching at home. John, one of the criticisms of Kamala Harris has been that she has not really engaged much with the press. Lots of angry American White House correspondents. And also when she has, it's been pretty light. So this was really the first chance to really test her mettle. Do you think we got more of a sense of what she would be like as president? I think I thought we got a sense of where she'll stand and fight. I think we got a sense that she is choosing to fight a very narrow election. There's only seven states really in contest in this. And the debate was in Pennsylvania, which is one of the states, which is crucial to the presidential. So she's moderated her positions. She's got a mantra, which is, my values are of state constant, but my positions, my politicians have changed. And that is good because she's basic technology and moving on. She's closing down a thing, which could be a vulnerability. Why talk about your past positions? Why talk about your most liberal positions? Why talk about the process through which you've changed your mind? Why do any of that when your actual thing is to make the contrast between you and your candidate that you're opposing Donald Trump? And I think she did a really good job of making the case that on key issues, security that Putin would eat him for lunch, those big issues on Ukraine, which Donald Trump couldn't answer whether he wanted Ukraine to actually win the war against Russia. On a range issue, on abortion, particularly, she took the fight to Trump in the sense that she made the contrast clear. She made her seriousness clear, which can be a bit boring, but the substance was there as well. So I think what we got was a substantial performance by somebody who's managed to avoid the Biden legacy big attached to her. Yes, I think Kate's right. The voters don't feel as well off as the economic figure should. And that's because inflation's really hurt. But I think she's managing to define herself as a new candidate, not the continuity Biden candidate. And Donald Trump, as Kate said, and his campaign team are struggling to find a way to attack Harris. And I think it is because they're still trying to fight their preferred candidate, which is Joe Biden. That ship has sailed, but Trump's not yet found a way to move towards a way he's not even found, particularly, a label for him when there's funny labels that he gets for calling Harris and Marxist. It is great for a big part of your base. But nobody knows what he means. It's not funny calling somebody a Marxist, it's sort of means that if we call him a calling him a California liberal, we'd probably be enough as an insult. But there's no wit, there's no wit there. I think the lack of Trump's wit, his humor, his cruel humor, was really showing, yes, that you can't think of a real zinger that he had, which showed why people were attracted to him in 2016. And Kate, just finally, I mean, clearly the last debate Biden v Trump was a game changing debate. We can overuse the phrase game changer. Do you think this one will really move the dial? I mean, all the polls right now is showing his really neck and neck in those swing states as to how it will go. I really can't put into words how disappointing. I actually think the more I think about it, how disappointing this really is for the Republican Party and the Republican candidate. As John says, she didn't have to talk about her past. There's a really good reason she doesn't want to. There's some pretty ugly stuff. If you go back to California about trying to go after parents whose kids are chilling out from school, there's really ugly stuff from when she was running in 2019 to be the presidential nominee. Ideas that she clearly picked up because she thought they were popular had no real interest in defending. Completely unclear still where she actually sits on these issues. And they're very far to the left compared to your average American voter. This is the stuff that changes minds and Donald Trump just couldn't say it. So I suspect that this debate won't be the game changing moment in the election. Like it would have been if Joe Biden has stayed in the race, but Trump missed a huge opportunity. Perhaps the only one he was really going to get unless he does take Harris up on this, maybe even calls her bluff on this idea that she wants a second debate. I don't see them why Harris would want a second debate when she clearly won the first. He's blown his moment to really call her out in front of the American people on all this flip-flopping. So in that sense, I think it's a decisive win for Kamala Harris, but how many hearts and minds it swayed and whether or not this is really going to be the moment where we look back and go, that's the moment the election changed. I'm a little more skeptical on that one. And Kate, we have GDP figures today. Talk us through them. The economy did not grow in July and it's not catastrophic news by any means. It's not good news because the economy didn't grow in June. It's a mistake to look at any one particular month of GDP growth and go, well, that's the narrative, but it builds up, right? So it's been a very slow summer. If you look at the three months up till July, the economy grew by 0.5%. This is nothing to write about, nothing particularly to celebrate, but the point is it's quite early to say, gosh, we're on recessions doorstep. I think it is, it is annoyingly quite conveniently news for the Labor Party in the sense that their whole narrative right now is that we are on the brink of disaster. If incredibly tough decisions aren't made, the economy is going to go through the floor. And this has felt like a bit of an exaggeration, especially when you do look at the trend of growth this year. At the start of the year, forecasters thought the UK would grow by a measly 0.4%. The Bank of England's last estimate in their last minutes put it at 1.5%, much, much healthier stuff. People are still optimistic after these figures in July that the UK economy is going to grow this year. But leading up to the budget, Labor cannot be making that argument and monthly growth figures, even though they only share a small sliver of the story of the overall context and story, are quite helpful for Labor right now if they're not looking so great, because that's what they're going to try to use to justify what's coming in October. John, does this vindicate Rachel Reeves when it comes to these decisions, or does it show how hard her task is, and perhaps that doom and gloom might make that growth job even trickier? Look, Kate's right. It's wrong to extrapolate from just one month's numbers. But it does fill in a colours in a bit of Rachel's argument, a bit of Rachel's positioning, which is there's been a struggle since the election to define what the electoral victory meant, people voted for change, but what kind of change do they want? And the vote on the winter, if you'll notice yesterday in Parliament, showed that there's a question, is the priority to restore the public finances, or is it to restore public services and public spending? I think this is a mark in Rachel's favour that she's saying, we do have in the UK a tricky economic situation where we need to get growth, growth is sluggish, you got no percent, no percent two months. This is difficult. We cannot shrink from the task of investing for growth, and that what we need is policies that invest for growth. And what is growth? Growth is a long term basis for spending on public services. I think Lebron going to give up the ambition to spend more, but growth is the growth is the long term basis. But it means in the short term, we can't do the things that MPs want to do, that voters may be wanting to do, constituents want to do. We've got to make the right decisions for the long term. Rachel is strongest when she's arguing about the long term, and there's no alternative argument on an economic model inside the Labour Party, apart from the sliver and the socialist campaign group that says there's a different way of managing the economy. So she's on a strongest with this kind of long term economic plan based on growth, which leads to ultimately more money for public services. She's at her weakest and most exposed when she tries to explain why Labour are doing things which smack off of a Tory government. Why pick up Theresa May's in 2017 policy means testing. It means testing that would fuel those. So I think this is a good backdrop for Labour to go into conference at the end of the month, so a good backdrop to go into the budget at the end of October. Thank you, John. Thank you, Kate, and thank you for listening.