Why Is This Debate Different From All Other Debates?

In the weekly video chat, Claire and guest expert Leah Wright Rigueur analyze last night's encounter between an angry, old and confused Trump and Kamala Harris, the Democratic party's rising star

Vice President Kamala Harris looks on in disbelief as Donald Trump loops and rambles about his “concept of a plan” that he might execute in a second term. Image credit: Screenshot by author/YouTube.

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Political junkies! Welcome to the morning after debate recap. Normally, we post these political chat on Friday, but I wanted to strike while the conversation about last night’s presidential debate was still hot. Although my regular co-host, Neil J. Young, is off this week, I am delighted to welcome my friend, historian and political analyst Leah Wright Rigueur, to the show. Leah is SNF Agora Institute Associate Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton, 2016), and will be recognizable to many of you from numerous print and television outlets, including CNN, MSNBC, and PBS.

I caught Leah this morning after she had already done several appearances and, as you can see, she is nevertheless fresh as a daisy. You will have to forgive my obvious bed head, as well as the tinny sound quality and extremely loud seagulls on my end: I am still broadcasting from an undisclosed location on The People’s Republic of Martha’s Vineyard.

If you have not yet had the opportunity to see last night’s debate, you might want to start there, or watch it after the analysis, when you know what to look and listen for.

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It’s 54 days to the election, and before we get to today’s chat, let’s catch up on the other political news of the week.

• The horserace: 538.com had VP Harris up a little less than 3 points going into the debate: it’s essentially a dead heat. But in August, Harris hauled in over three times as much money as Trump did in August. So, if this comes down to the ground game—and I think it will—it’s advantage Harris.

In the battle to control the Senate, here are some critical races that were looking to get a boost from a strong Harris performance last night:

• Montana’s Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, seems stalled at a six-point deficit with businessman and former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy.

• In a key Maryland Senate race, former prosecutor Angela Alsobrooks has jumped 5 points ahead of the popular former Republican Governor, Larry Hogan.

• Incumbent Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown is clinging to a three-point lead in his race to retain his seat against former luxury car dealer Bernie Moreno: that’s going to be a nail biter.

• Texas Democratic challenger Colin Alred has moved within striking distance of Republican incumbent Ted Cruz—from 8 points to four or five points—since Harris entered the race. Can he do it? Texas Democrats break our hearts regularly—but at least they know how to win them.

Finally, the news of the weird in review: Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance claimed on Monday that his office was receiving numerous complaints about legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio stealing and eating people’s household pets, a topic that Trump inexplicable introduced into the debate. Ohio police claim to have not received any such complaints, and Vance said on Tuesday that his office had received th4 complaints—but that it was “possible” they weren’t true. Leah and I touch down briefly on this crazy episode.

So now, let’s get down to business. Today, Leah and I discuss how Kamala Harris turned the tables on Donald Trump last night, stealing the debate narrative from an aging former president used to writing his own, often outlandish, story. But we also talk about a bigger shift in American political culture: Black women may be leading the Democratic Party, and the nation, into the future. Leah puts Vice President Harris’s candidacy in the context of a longer Black political history studded with women path breakers.

Together, we also take a deep dive into gender, including the intriguing and historically counterintuitive question: has Harris’s femininity become an asset against an historically misogynist opponent?

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Your host:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

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