Kamala Harris did a lot of things right in the heated debate. Why she is still far from reaching her goal.
Before we get to the cats, it’s best to take a quick look at the starting position: the expectations before this TV duel were enormous. Media people stylized it as the “most important duel in history.” Voters, it was said, knew pretty much everything they needed to know about Donald Trump, but they were still wondering where Kamala Harris stood and what type of politician she was. The Democrats’ nervous hope was particularly high: perhaps she would convince voters who were still undecided if they just heard more from her.
The debate, it was said, was the biggest opportunity for Kamala Harris to make a name for herself. Maybe even her last opportunity, as she only has two months left.
The question now is: Did she do that?
Which brings us almost to the cats.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – like Tom and Jerry
Of course, Kamala Harris was extremely prepared. She knew what points she wanted to address, she spoke calmly, calmly and often talked about her plans in great detail, for example about rent reductions and tax breaks for young parents. The poor Trump people probably assumed that she was reading from an invisible teleprompter.
More importantly, Harris was a clever trapper. No matter what political tripwire she laid out, Trump trampled over it; it was vaguely reminiscent of a “Tom and Jerry” episode, clearly with Harris in the role of the clever mouse. Harris infuriated the increasingly angry Donald Trump when she talked about his rallies, which he is so proud of. Many people, she teased, would leave his speeches long before the end because of boredom and exhaustion.
She brought Trump to an operating temperature that allowed him to tell that absurd episode with the cats early on. “A lot of cities don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed,” he said. “In Springfield, they eat the dogs. The people who came here eat the cats. They eat – they eat the pets of the people who live there.” Moderator David Muir immediately rebuked Trump, saying the claim was simply not true. And Harris didn’t have to do much more than laugh at Trump’s story.
The Republicans are not talking about a duel. They’re talking about: cats
Many Republicans, however, are now really getting into the cat horror story that Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance raised when he claimed that illegal migrants from Haiti were stealing and eating pets in a city in the US state of Ohio. Now Republican representatives and officials are flooding social media with cat pictures; Trump himself posted a picture of a cat with a MAGA cap and a machine gun.
Meow. This is the reality that Kamala Harris is running against. The cat reality. That’s the extent of the US political landscape. To stay with the metaphor: She went to the dogs.
In another reality, the evening went really badly for Donald Trump. And yet Kamala Harris can’t celebrate yet. Because many voters still have less confidence in her, especially when it comes to economic policy, and if Trump does not suffer any political damage after this performance, then that means that he is even more invulnerable to the traditional rules of politics than the Democrats imagined. Because Trump still has a damn good chance of getting back into the White House.
If the polls don’t go up for Kamala Harris in the coming days as a result of the debate, things will be very tight for her. Then she failed to win over the few remaining swing voters. And this evening will go down in US history. What a big bummer.
