DEBATES: Harris prevailed, CNN survey said!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2024

Donald Trump's numbers were different: It's never completely clear what we mean when we ask who "won" a presidential debate. 

It's never quite clear what that means! But by most assessments, Candidate Harris prevailed this past Tuesday night. 

What was the candidate's victory margin? Overnight, at 2:37 on Wednesday morning, CNN offered this report about its instant survey of people who watched the debate:

CNN Flash Poll: Majority of debate watchers say Harris outperformed Trump onstage

Registered voters who watched Tuesday’s presidential debate broadly agree that Kamala Harris outperformed Donald Trump, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS. The vice president also outpaced both debate watchers’ expectations for her and Joe Biden’s onstage performance against the former president earlier this year, the poll found.

Debate watchers said, 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia. Prior to the debate, the same voters were evenly split on which candidate would perform more strongly, with 50% saying Harris would do so and 50% that Trump would. 

For better or worse, that's what the survey said. 

That said, a citizen can never be sure! Within an hour of the debate, Candidate Trump was in the "spin room"—and he was reporting a vastly different set of numbers about who had won the debate.

Below, you see some of the survey results the candidate reported. To see him do so, click here:

HANNITY (late Tuesday night): What made you come to the spin room?

TRUMP: I just felt I wanted to. I was very happy with the result. 

So the candidate said to Hannity, right there in the spin room. A bit earlier, also in the spin room, he had made this array of claims:

TRUMP (9/10/24): When you're looking at polls, the worst—the worst poll that we've had was 71 that I see...

We had a 92% rating in one poll...

We had an 86% rating in another. We had 77%...

One poll is 92% to 6...

92 to 7. 92 to 6; 88 to 11...

REPORTER: Mr. President, speak louder.

TRUMP: All of the polls are 60, 70 and 80. 86 to 3!

 The polls are indicating that we got 90%, 60%, 72%, 71% and 89%.

REPORTER: Where are you getting those numbers from?

SECOND REPORTER: Yes, where are you getting those numbers from?

"Where are you getting those numbers from?" Someone had asked a good question!

For the record, it was obvious where the candidate was "getting those numbers from." The candidate was pulling those numbers right straight out of his asp.

Plainly, this was a form of public madness—something resembling insanity. 

The candidate's conduct in the spin room recalls the scene from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) in which Senator Iselin—a Joe McCarthy doppelganger—keeps changing his account of the number of card-carrying Communists within the Defense Department.

As presented in that iconic film, Senator Iselin is a simple-minded buffoon with a diabolical wife. You can watch the scene in question simply by clicking here:

SENATOR ISELIN (pompously): I am United States Senator John Yerkes Iselin, and I have here a list of the names of 207 persons who are known by the Secretary of Defense as being members of the Communist Party who are still nevertheless working at shaping the policy of the Defense Department.

[...]

MAJOR MARCO: I'd like to verify that number, sir. How many Communists did you say?

ISELIN: Oh, uh— I said there are exactly—I have absolutely proof there are 104 card-carrying Communists in the Defense Department at this time.

MAJOR MARCO (puzzled): How many, sir?

ISELIN: Uh—275, and that's absolutely all I have to say on that subject at this time.

REPORTER: Major, how many did he say?

The senator had been pulling his numbers out of his keister too. Later, he begs his wife to let him settle on just one number of card-carrying Communists—on a number he'll find it easy to remember.

In that scene, director John Frankenheimer took his film to the level of high parody. A living, breathing nominee was loudly performing a similar scene this past Tuesday night.

That said, this was not some form of crazy parody. We'd be inclined to call it what it is—a form of public madness.

When a nominee behaves that way, we'd call it front-page news. Instead, a card-carrying careerist at the New York Times—the head of the editorial board—sucked her thumb in the wake of Tuesday's debate, in the way we described yesterday afternoon:

The Question Kamala Harris Couldn’t Answer

[...]

Over the weekend, a survey by The New York Times and Siena College found that 60 percent of likely voters said they believed America was headed in the wrong direction, and many reported that they didn’t know enough about where Harris stands on several key issues. Any poll is just a snapshot in time, and it is admittedly hard to interpret exactly what those respondents are looking for from her. Do they want a better understanding of how she plans to govern from the Oval Office in terms of policy? Or are they more interested in her character and what type of leader she would be?

For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed. According to the Times tracker, the vice president spent nearly half of her speaking time attacking Trump. She rightfully called out his lies and his dangerous embrace of dictators. She was also strong in defending reproductive rights, as well as President Biden’s record on foreign and domestic policy. And she mentioned a handful of plans she’d pursue if she won the White House.

Yet we learned very few new details about those plans...

That was the chairperson's takeaway. Trump was briefly mentioned in passing, and so on, then on and on.

As far as we know, Kathleen Kingsbury is a thoroughly good, decent person. Also, plenty of questions should still be asked of the Democratic nominee, who was in fact a bit evasive at various times Tuesday night. 

That said, Kingsbury's newspaper keeps normalizing the transparent madness of the other nominee. Some are now describing this sort of thing as "sane-washing." 

In our view, this behavior by our major news orgs is its own form of public madness. It represents a type of dumbness which seems to know no bounds.

Many questions remain to be asked of the two nominees. That said, one of the nominees routinely engages in acts of transparent madness. The people who sit at the top of the press corps refuse to address this fact.

The New York Times continues to normalize the apparent madness of Candidate Trump. As it does, the Fox News Channel continues along in its own brand of public misconduct.

Tuesday's presidential debate took place in the shadow of those influential orgs. Our pledge to you today will be this:

Tomorrow morning, we're going to show you what former "TV judge" Joe Brown said on the Fox News Channel this past Saturday night. As we've noted, he had recently referred to Candidate Harris as "a piece of sh*t" and a "humping hyena"—and that made him perfect for Fox.

It's depressing and painful to transcribe such garbage-can behavior. Tomorrow, we'll force ourselves to do it.

That said, you won't read about any of this in the New York Times. The Times is normalizing the madness of Candidate Trump, but it's also normalizing the (highly influential) moral squalor of Fox.

Survey said 86-3! At the cowardly lion known as the Times, this sort of thing seems to make perfect sense!

Tomorrow: We promise we're going to do it