Thank you for watching here in the US and all over the world and from all of us. All right, that's it. The ABC News presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump has just wrapped up, and the surrogates are making their way into the spin room here at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. There's a lot to break down. Remember, the last presidential debate on CNN was perhaps the most consequential in American history. President Biden so badly.

He was basically forced off the ticket.

So how is this debate going to impact the race going forward? I'm going to go find CNN and White House correspondent Priscilla Alvarez and CNN's Elaina Thrien, who covers the Trump campaign to find out. From CNN in Philadelphia, this is one thing. I'm David Ryan. Priscilla, hello. Hi. Elaina. Hi. Hi. So we are here. It's Midnight on the Dot here in the spin room, and we just watched this debate. So Priscilla, let me start with you. For someone who didn't watch, what's the big picture takeaway in your mind from what just happened?

The vice president's team had spent a lot of time preparing her to go Trump, to needle him on a number of issues, be it reproductive rights, on the economy. And AIDS were very really pleased about how the debate went because they felt that every time that she tried to needle him, not only on issues, but also on his rallies, that he took the bait.

I'm going to actually do something really unusual, and I'm going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies because it's a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lector. He will talk about when mills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your desires.

And I was getting messages for the entire time from aides and allies who were just gushing over her performance. And with any big moment, there is some anxiety. This was a high high reward moment for her, and they are all walking away feeling as though she did what she needed to do.

Elaina, we know Trump has had issues staying on message, but to Priscilla's point, it did seem like any time there was just a little opening for something he would go off somewhere completely different.

It's interesting because as much as Priscilla just said that the Harris campaign had been pushing her and prepping her to try and go to him into these attacks, the Trump campaign was doing the opposite. They were preparing him and urging him not to fall for that, to not take the debate, to stay restrained, really talking overall about the tone and temperament. A lot of advisors had told me they were more concerned about that than they were the substance of the answers. But I think it was clear watching it that he did fall for that at points. And one person close to Trump even acknowledged that to me. They had said that it was clear that she was successful at times with getting him to do that, particularly that answer where she went after him about people leaving his rallies early. We know that that is something- That seemed to really tick him off. Yeah, that's something that Donald Trump cares a lot about. You hear him all the time talking about crowd size. I think that particular line of attack landed with him and caused him to go off script a bit.

Let me just ask, though, why did you try to kill that Bill, and successfully so, that would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border?

First, let me respond to the rallies. She said, People start leaving. People don't go to her rally. There's no reason to go. The people that do go, she's bussing them in and paying them to be there and then showing them in a different light.

Look, I wasn't having Trump advisors text me unsolicited nonstop. I had to reach out to them and get their responses, which I think speaks for itself.

Right. On the optics of this, these two had never met face-to-face before. So we got a handshake at the start, which was interesting the way they handled that.

And intentional. She wanted to do that. The campaign had been getting questions about whether or not she would go for that handshake. Of course, that was also a question. One former President, Donald Trump, met President Joe Biden on the stage in June, and she wanted to do that. And that was actually one of the first moments where I started getting messages because she walked over to the former President to give him that handshake. It was not clear that he was expecting it in that moment.

Right. We actually saw JD Vance, his running mate, respond to that on Twitter and mock Harris for introducing herself to him, even though, of course, we've reported that this is the first time that we actually formally met. They've never really been in the same room together unless you count his Congressional addresses or State of the Union addresses. Look, I think the optics, of course, plays a huge role in this, as particularly for someone like Donald Trump, who is always very aware of where a camera is at all times, a TV presence. That's why he likes to make things all about him.

And this is an audio medium, but Harris was really making use of being on TV and having that split screen, it seemed to me.

Well, she was making facial expressions while the former President was speaking. I actually texted somebody about that because I was curious what they were making of it. For example, was she making those facial expressions because the microphones were muted? So that was a way for her to emote to what the former President was saying. But someone I spoke with said, Look, that's also just who she is. This was a medium that we just haven't seen her in in a long time, and it allowed for that. I will say for listeners, this is a fun fact that we saw tonight, too. There is a big difference in height between the former President and the vice President. Their podiums were different sizes as well. So in the moments where it wasn't just the split screen of their faces, you could also see their height difference when the camera zoomed out, which was something, again, these little things that we just didn't know because they haven't been next to each other.

Where I also think the facial expressions are always so interesting because we know that Donald Trump is very expressive. He's been very expressive in the past on debate stages. There's all those memes about him from past debates and making faces. Tonight, it was interesting. I think in the first maybe 20 minutes, he was pretty restrained when speaking about his facial expressions, and then he got a little bit more emotive as the night went on, particularly- His voice got a lot louder, too. Exactly. Particularly in One thing I heard a lot from the people I spoke with and some of Trump's advisors was when he was getting fact-checked.

You can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia, not the current governor, who's doing an excellent job, but the governor before, he said, The baby will be born, and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we'll execute the baby.

One, they've been arguing that the level of fact checks that each of them received is not fair or equal, that it threw him off his game.

There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born. Madam Vice President, I want to get your response to President Trump. Well, as I said, you're going to hear a bunch of lies, and that's not actually a surprising fact. Let's understand how we got here. Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v Wade.

Of course, we've seen the Trump campaign in the past, and they're doing it again tonight, attack the moderators, although you know that people say, When you attack the moderators, that's not, oh, that means you're on the losing end of the argument.

Or you're just saying more things that are untrue and thus need to be fact-checked.

Right. So that's been a key thing. And even tonight in the spin room, as I talk to many of Trump's advisors and his surrogates, One of the first things they said was that this was a three-on-one debate, obviously, referring to both of the two moderators as well as Harris against Trump. We've seen this happen in the past. You've also seen the campaign try to pre-but this by already labeling ABC News as biased. But again, that tends to be an argument that I think voters often see through as well.

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there.

I have to ask because this has been percolating, and we saw it on the stage again tonight. Town in Ohio, and and migrants eating cats. Can you just explain what the heck they were talking about up there?

This is something that has really been more prominently shared and promoted by Republicans, including those on Donald Trump's campaign, his own son, his running major events on Twitter. This false claim, and I have to be clear about that, this is a false claim that Haitian migrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, have been killing their pets and eating their pets. Now, again, there is no evidence of this. The city of Springfield, as well as local police, have pushed back very heavily saying that there is no evidence to support these claims, but it is something that has taken taken off on social media. I'm sure some of our listeners have seen some of the artificial intelligence photos of Donald Trump posing with cats and dogs and pets. Donald Trump brought this up himself today.

I was going to say, it's not like the moderators asked him specifically about this. He just went off on this, and the moderators had to jump in and say, Hey, there's no evidence for this.

Right. And when they did that, Donald Trump's response was that he saw it on TV, which I don't think lended a lot of credence to that. We heardI've heard David Ware repeatedly say that ABC had gone in contact with the head of the city in Springfield, and they have refuted those claims.

Maybe he said that, and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.

I'm not taking this But the people on television are taking it from the city manager.

But the people on television are saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there.

Again, the Springfield City Manager says there's no evidence of that. Vice President Harris, I'll let you respond to the rest of what you've heard.

You talk about extreme.

It's a weird I think a lot of this... One thing, when you cover the Trump campaign, sometimes they latch on to these random small moments and make them go viral. And I think that's what this was. Even after it had been refuted, they continued to share this, even when it was brought to their attention that this was a false claim. Look, we have our fact checked up on CNN. I encourage everyone to listen in because I'm sure I'm not doing it justice as well as some of our writers. But it was a very bizarre moment. I definitely would think in the spin room, you could hear everyone take an intake of breath during that. It was bizarre.

Priscilla, something that undecided voters are telling pollsters is that they still want to learn more about Kamala Harris. Do you I think that she accomplished that tonight?

Well, and the vice president has also shared that with her inner circle. She is aware that this was a moment where she could bring in a large audience, the debate would bring in the large audience, and that she would do exactly that, introduce or reintroduce herself to voters.

I'll tell you, as a prosecutor, I never asked a victim or a witness, Are you a Republican or a Democrat? The only thing I ever asked them, Are you okay? That's the President we need right now, someone who cares about you and is not putting themselves first. I intend to be a President for all Americans.

The folks that I've spoken with think that tonight allowed voters to see a side of her they haven't seen yet, to go toe to toe with the former President, to be able to lay out her vision and her policies, because not everyone is following her Stump Species the way Elaine and I are following these candidates on the trail. And so I think what we have heard consistently from the vice president and her team is that the work is not done. I don't think that they are walking away from this thinking, okay, everyone knows her now, and it's a win in November. They still recognize that they need to be on the trail often so that they still get to FaceTime with voters, so they still feel like they know her, not only her, but what her policies are and why there have been changes on issues or not.

Lena, do we have a sense of how bad this was for Trump?

I even think saying how bad it was. I mean, look, I think there's definitely things that Trump's own team recognizes he could have done better, including, I talked to one of the advisors who said, Yeah, they tried to go after Harris on avoiding questions or trying to attack her answers on the economy and inflation, as well as her response to questions about her changing her position, some of the flip flops on fracking, for example.

Fracking? She's been against it for 12 years. Defund the police. She's been against that forever. She gave all that stuff up very wrongly, very horribly, and everybody's laughing at it.

I argued to them. I said, Well, shouldn't Donald Trump have tried to veer her back to that conversation? They acknowledged that he could have done a better job steering her back toward that issue, especially given that is the number one issue that Trump thinks and voters say is their top issue in November, but it's also an issue where Trump pulls higher. You also heard Donald Trump in the spin room tonight saying he won, she lost.

That's another thing we should mention that Trump came here to the spin room, and I have never seen a Scrum like we saw surround him.

Oh, yeah. I got mauled in there. I think I got an elbow to the face at one point. Yeah. I mean, look, you're always going to have Donald Trump and his team say that they won the debate. That's why we're in the spin room. This is where the spitting happens. As much as you're going to hear the Harris I may not argue that as well. Clearly, this debate went very differently for Donald Trump than that first debate. And a big part of it, I do believe, is one of their fears coming true in a sense that he was unsuccessful in keeping that level of restraint that his advisors had really pushed him to do of buying into some of the goading that Harris let him down. I think we'll have to see. I always am tempted to take a to see what other people think after a debate night to see if it lines up with our thoughts.

And it's worth remembering that Donald Trump, quote unquote, lost those debates to Hillary Clinton back in 2016.

Which is something, by the way, that advisors, Harris advisors, were mentioning to me going into this debate, recognizing that even a really good debate night does not guarantee a win in November, and they were keenly aware of that going in. And it's also a message that we're hearing coming out.

Well, I want to talk about the big news that we got right after this debate, which appeared on Instagram, a big celebrity endorsement from Taylor Swift, no less of Kamala Harris. What did her team make of that, Priscilla?

So I want to start by saying that I have been covering the Harris campaign, but I also covered the then Biden campaign. And I only say that because the context here at the time when I was covering that campaign was that it was really hard to get celebrity endorsements. This was something that I had been hearing for for some time. And then when the President dropped out of the race and the vice President assumed the top of the ticket, we saw multiple celebrities come out. But the big question, even during that time, the Democratic National Convention, if people remember, that had a bunch of star-studded performances, was whether or not Taylor Swift was going to weigh in. And that was answered tonight in the moments after the debate when she said she would. I have been texting with Harris campaign officials. They were all caught by surprise. The campaign did not receive-They didn't know it was coming. They did not receive a heads up that it was coming. They were all thrilled by the news because it is no small thing for Taylor Swift to make an endorsement. So they are welcoming her on the trail if she's open to going on the trail.

But certainly, very happy news for the Harris campaign. It's another endorsement that they can add to the list.

Yeah, It remains to be seen how much celebrity endorsements actually matter in the grand scheme of things, but no doubt it's a big momentum boost for them. I guess going forward, guys, where does this go from here? Obviously, the last debate was seismic and that President Biden dropped out, what change do we think this one could have?

I think there's no questions that for people who say debates don't matter. It really does depend, as we saw with the June 27th CNN debate that led to set off the series of events that led to Biden ending his campaign. Look, I think it's unclear. I think in certain debates, if it's a really defining moment, it could have the capacity to really alter the race. I think this is one of the final defining moments that they're going to have before the end of this race. Did it alter the state of the race? I think that is unclear. What's interesting is we did see the Harris campaign put out a statement Then after this saying that they would agree to a second debate. Donald Trump, remember, had also said previously that he agreed to three debates, including this one. He had previously agreed to a Fox News debate that was supposed to be on September fourth, but the Harris campaign did not agree. He also agreed to a September 25th, NBC News debate. I asked Trump's advisors, including his senior advisor, Brian Hughes, does that still stand? He said he thinks it still stands, but we'll see.

I haven't gotten a clear answer on what's going to happen there. But I think if it leads to another debate, it could be another defining moment that we could have before November.

I think the other two points to take into consideration here is that, number one, one of the goals for the Harris campaign going into tonight was reaching the undecided voters, the persuadable voters, especially those who don't know her very well. And if they can make inroads with a debate like this one, with that block, then that would be a boost to them. Of course, we won't know what that actually means until election day. But also, and I think the three of us can attest to this, we still have weeks before election day, and a lot can happen in that span of time. This was one of those unscripted moments that the vice president has had. There has been a push for her to do more of that. So how all of this contributes to that decision making will be interesting to watch. But certainly, there's still quite a bit of time left in this election, even if we are on the final stretch.

Yeah, it's still road to go here. Priscilla, Elaina, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you, David.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paulo Ortiz and me, David Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Fez Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Liktai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasari, Robert Mather's, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, James Sandrace, Nicole Passereau, and Lisa Namarau. Special thanks to Brian Rocus, DJ Judd, Wendy Brundage, and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Sunday. In the meantime, catch up with the latest on the campaign cnen. Com or on the CNN Five Things podcast. I'll talk to you later.