The News
US presidential nominees former US President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage Tuesday for their first — and potentially only — debate ahead of the November presidential election.
Harris was widely hailed for her performance, with many analysts and pundits on both sides of the political spectrum declaring her the winner, having succeeded in baiting Trump into a debate on her terms, Semafor’s David Weigel wrote.
However, both Harris and Trump refused to elaborate on several key policy proposals, and some voters may have been left with more questions than answers.
SIGNALS
Harris didn’t address some voters’ hesitancy toward her
Ahead of the debate, polling by The New York Times found that many voters still did not know where Kamala Harris stands on several major issues. And despite her coming off strong on Tuesday, at the debate “we learned very few new details about those [policy] plans,” wrote Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. Harris “scratched the surface” of her plans to cut taxes and build more affordable housing, and she didn’t expand on how she would work to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Perhaps even more importantly, Kingsbury wrote, she did not clearly distinguish her agenda from that of Biden, even as “the electorate seems hungry for change.”
Trump ducked on abortion, again
Donald Trump sidestepped again Tuesday on whether he would sign a national abortion ban if reelected. In the leadup to the debate, Trump has long ducked the question, while also repeating the false claims about Democrats killing babies after they are born — but those deflections had little utility Tuesday, The Guardian wrote, inviting corrections by the debate moderators and providing Harris a clear opening to contrast herself with the former president with a clear and impassioned defense of reproductive rights. “The moment was a reminder that Harris is uniquely positioned to talk about the hot-button, national topic in a way that [US President Joe Biden}, an 81-year-old Catholic who had long opposed abortion, never felt comfortable doing,” The Washington Post wrote.
Healthcare remains thorn in Trump’s side
Having failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act as president, on Tuesday Donald Trump failed to articulate what his alternative to the ACA, should he be reelected, would look like, saying instead that he has the “concepts of a plan.” Healthcare is a recurring weak point for him, The Wall Street Journal wrote, and may come top of lawmakers and voters minds during this fall’s open enrollment period, ahead of the November election. “Whoever is elected president will have to face a reality about Obamacare in 2025, whether they have a plan to replace it or not,” the outlet noted — Biden-era subsidies for the ACA expire in 2025, and addressing what to do about it will become an early term obstacle for the next president and Congress.