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If you are reading this, you probably knew who you were going to vote for long before Tuesday night’s presidential debate.
The reason for this is simple: The minority of American voters who lack a strong attachment to either party tend to pay less attention to politics than partisans do. Any political actor trying to reach undecideds must therefore mind the knowledge gap that lies between themselves and their audience.
And that is one thing that Donald Trump utterly failed to do at the debate in Philadelphia. For this reason, among others, Vice President Kamala Harris was likely the chief beneficiary of her first oratorical showdown with the Republican nominee.
The first indication that Trump may have allowed himself to become “too online” for the normie debate watcher came before the event had even begun. When the former president’s plane touched down in Philadelphia, the far-right internet personality Laura Loomer was among the VIPs who emerged from its hull (if you recognize that name, no presidential candidate should waste time trying to appeal to you). Loomer has voiced the opinion that “there’s a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy. Right? And a lot of liberals and left-wing globalist Marxist Jews don’t understand that.” It is theoretically possible that a person with that perspective might be a good sounding board for a politician hoping to reach moderate moms in the Milwaukee suburbs, but that does not seem likely.
In any case, once on stage, Trump routinely betrayed signs of being the kind of man who knows who Loomer and Nick Fuentes are and who can probably recite Fox News’s primetime lineup.
Early in the debate, Trump sought to illustrate the horrors that the Biden-era upsurge in asylum seekers brought to America’s shores. Polls suggest swing voters share Trump’s general concern with immigration levels, and there were surely countless ways that he could have articulated the restrictionist argument that they would have found coherent and sensible. Here is what he chose to say instead:
What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our 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 — 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.
For any American who is not immersed in right-wing social media, these remarks were surely disorienting. Trump invoked “Aurora” or “Springfield” without any explanation, as though these places were synonymous with well-known disasters (rather than obscure right-wing conspiracy theories). And his answer only got more puzzling from there, as he declared that “the people that came in” are eating “the dogs” and “the cats.”
Here, Trump was referring to a baseless, racist allegation — promulgated chiefly by his running mate — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are kidnapping and consuming their neighbors’ pets. His reference was plain to all of us fallen souls who, by dint of our social media addictions, were forced to scroll through the most hateful AI-generated images of cats ever conceived earlier this week. But to anyone else, he sounded like a Fox News superfan who’d accidentally ingested some of his grandson’s LSD.
For swing voters, many of Trump’s ravings sounded like a summary of the sixth season of a show they’d never watched
In other moments, Trump’s attack lines were less wildly detached from reality but still lacked sufficient exposition for those hearing them for the first time.
In trying to spotlight the left-wing stances that Harris embraced during her 2020 primary campaign, Trump declared, “she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
Here, Trump was referring to the fact that, in a questionnaire from the ACLU in 2019, Harris had answered “yes” when asked if she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”
Trump is probably right to smell a potential advantage in attacking Harris for favoring taxpayer-funded medical treatments for undocumented immigrants. But he did not walk viewers through exactly what Harris had endorsed and its implications. Instead, he chose to summarize her position in shorthand while needlessly distorting it, suggesting that she wanted to “do transgender operations on illegal aliens” (rather than provide such care to them), as though the vice president had intended to impose gender transition on detained immigrants against their will. The effect was to make Trump’s attack sound more baseless than it actually was.
Elsewhere, Trump’s references were plausibly too highbrow; he repeatedly declared Harris a “Marxist,” a term that might not have much resonance for non-college-educated voters who weren’t fully sentient during the Cold War. He also referred to “the Nord Stream 2 pipeline” without immediate elaboration and touted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s praise, an endorsement that may carry weight with the extremely online right but means nothing to most ordinary voters.
Perhaps the single most telling illustration of Trump’s failure to comprehend the distinction between his Truth Social following and swing voters, though, was when he referred to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot as “J6” — an abbreviation that few who have never been subject to a microblogging platform’s character limit would have any reason to use or even recognize.
All of this said, it is certainly true that I am no more the relevant audience for Tuesday’s debate than Laura Loomer superfans are. Whatever our political leanings, those of us who read the New York Times each morning or watch Fox News every night — and scroll X all hours in between — live in a different universe than the people whose fickle allegiances will decide November’s election. We know what references to JD Vance’s “couch” are supposed to convey. They know what it’s like to have healthy and fulfilling hobbies. We are not the same.
But I’m not relying on mere intuition when claiming that Harris won last night’s contest. The available viewer polls and swing-voter focus groups available indicate the Democrat routed her rival, as do the betting markets. If that consensus holds, Trump’s inability to speak to voters who aren’t like me — which is to say, those who don’t immediately know what “J6” refers to — will be one reason for his failed debate.
