Aloha and Namaste, everyone. And welcome to InPolitic with John Heilman, my podcast for Odyssey and Puck, coming at you every Wednesday and Friday with fresh topical candid conversations with the people who roam the quarters of power and influence in America, from Washington to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and beyond. And every once in a while, the people who cover those people, people at the pinnacle of power, people who are currently running for President. You may or may not recall that two and a half months ago, at the end of June, my partners Dylan Byers and Peter Hamby scramble the jets and joined me for a late night taping after the Biden-Trump debate in Atlanta, a. K. A. The 90 minute human car crash that changed almost everything about the 2024 election. To this day, it remains one of the most memorable podcast episodes I have ever been a part of. And I will add, if you are willing to take a stroll down a particularly dark stretch of memory and give it a listen, I think you'll find that it holds up pretty damn well. Peter and Dylan are both wicked smart and more fun than a barrel of drunk monkeys to boot.

So there was never any real doubt that when the first and maybe only 2024 general election debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was scheduled to take place last night in Philadelphia, the call would go out. Puck Superfunds, activate, or rather, reactivate. And that Dylan and Peter would answer that call and come through with flying colors, which you won't be surprised to learn, is exactly what has happened. Fight Night in the Cradle of Liberty turned out to be a radically different affair than the debacle in Dogwood City back in June. Call this one the triggering of Trump, or the dismembering of the Donald, or the revenge of the candidate's split screen. Call it anything you want, just so long as you acknowledge what took place last night for what it was as a debate, quad debate. Kdh opening a can of serious Whoop Ass on DJT. For a variety of reasons, some easily explicable and others as yet unknown, what, if any effect the debate will have on the outcome of the election, is impossible to forecast reliably. Only a few hours after this round of mortal combat in Philadelphia came to its conclusion. But I will tell you this with 100% certainty.

Team K was popping champagne quirks last night, literally or metaphorically, while Trump World was popping malox or cramming clonipin down their gullets by the fistful. The Puck Super Friends got into all of this in our late night Hot Take-A-Rama. We had fun, again, doing it, and we hope you'll have fun listening to this latest episode of InPolitic with John Heilman, coming at you in three, two, one.

She is Biden. She's trying to get away from Biden. I don't know the gentleman. She says, She is Biden. The worst inflation we've ever had. A horrible economy because inflation has made it so bad, and she can't get away with that. Thank you.

Your time is up.

I want to respond to that, though. I want to just respond briefly. Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump. What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country, one who believes in what is possible, one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do. Let's talk about our plans, and let's compare the plans. That's the conversation, I believe, David, that people really want tonight, as opposed to a conversation that is constantly about belittling and name calling. Let's turn the page and move forward. Vice President Harris.

Thank you. The Puck Superfunds are reactivated here. I would say that That Donald Trump sound came at 10:24 in the debate. It's a 90-minute debate. It came 84 minutes into the debate, where it took... That's how long it took Donald Trump to try to pin Joe Biden's record on Kamala Harris. And not only would it... It seems like that's a win for Kamala Harris. On top of that, a few minutes later, she got Taylor Swift's endorsement, which really is more important probably than anything that happened on the debate stage tonight. Peter and Dylan, tell me if you agree or disagree and what just your biggest overarching thoughts. Start with you, Peter, your overarching thoughts here. My understanding of when you play basketball, you don't throw the alley-oop to your opponent, like over their basket and allow them to slam it home. That's what Trump did there with that. You are Joe Biden. I am not Joe Biden. Look at me. It's obvious. Anyway, please hold forth.

Yeah, John, shout out. Maybe this is your experience of the recount, but excellent sound bite curation. I thought, now How did I listen to it again? That bite really summed up what you're talking about and summed up why the debate was so strong for Kamala Harris. On issue after issue and topic after topic, she was able to turn a Donald Trump attack back on Trump and make him both be on defense, but also pivot into rambling about, yes, the eating of the dog's sound bite is going viral, but just barrage of conspiracy theories. And Harris was correct, a lot of lies. And the Al-Yup thing, the self-own, also happened in the very beginning of the debate when they were talking about abortion and abortion rights. And Trump, he was so caught between wanting to make the Family Research Council feel good over here, but also assure suburban women over here that he doesn't want to ban abortion nationwide. Wide. He praised the Supreme Court justices for being brave and overturning Roe v Wade, but it was also like, We've done the right thing and taken it back to the states. Anyway, everything he was saying was literally what Kamala Harris wanted to say.

It was just coming out of his mouth. And the other thing that was interesting, too, about the sound bite that you picked is you're right, it came so late. Trump wasn't able until later in the debate, to get to the things that he should have been talking about, which are border security. He did talk about border security in the first answer, but her record with Joe Biden, the economy. He got so twisted up and triggered that he wasn't able in her flip-ups. Yeah, he didn't get to the flip-up thing until like 40, 45 minutes in. And it just showed his lack of discipline and how easily triggered he was by both Harris, but also the moderators in some cases.

I'm going to call this podcast The Triggering, I think, because there's a lot of triggering. A lot of triggering that went on here. Dylan, please give us your 30,000 to put over for you.

Yeah, well, look, I mean, first of all, obviously a big win for Harris, and I think everybody knows that and is feeling that. And there's obviously a great deal of post-game working of the refs happening on the Trump side that we can get into in a little bit. But I think fair to say to just carry your basketball analogy a little bit further, it is hard to blame the refs if you're not even making your shots. So we'll get there. I think just in terms of the Harris performance, what stood out to me, and this very much through the media lens, she came so equipped to do things in the visual medium that carried both during the live debate itself, if you were watching the entire debate, and will be very easily and effectively repurposed in a social viral environment. You think about the way that she looked at him, this look at him like, Are you crazy? Are you really saying that? The hand on the chin. When when he's accusing her and her father of being Marxists. This whole attitude towards him that he was the one actually who got in the Reagan, There you go again, line against her.

But her My attitude toward him for 90 minutes was not just, there you go again, but are you really this nuts? And are you really making it this easy for me? And then I think, too, obviously, she had so many one-liners that were effective during the debate and that will carry really well after the debate on morning television, on social media. Just a few of them that stood out to me. Inviting people to go to his rallies and telling them what they would see, the line about... God, what was it? I've only ever had one client, the People. I never ask if they're Republican or Democrat. I only ask, Are you okay? The racism, the housing, Central Park Five, Obama birtherism, 81 million people fired you. Oh my God, so many. Really, most effectively, all of the things she said that got under his skin about what the people who had worked for him said about him, about the fact that he was a disgrace, about the fact that he was weak, all of those words that he has used towards other people over the course of the last decade that were said toward him that really triggered him and was just so effective in getting inside of his head and getting under his skin.

I'm going to say just a couple of quick things here, one of which is, and they're probably the only negative there. I mean, they're not really negative things about her, but I'll get them out of the way. She looked nervous for the first 10 minutes, and you didn't know where it was going to go. And I'll get to the moment when we'll get and play some sound for the moment when that changed, which Peter, who rightly pointed out, was really on row. The debate turned on row, and it turned her confidence level and her aggressiveness and all that stuff. When she got into that topic, she never looked back. I think she got stronger as the night went on. But the first 10 minutes, I don't think I'd be able to remember it. And like the Biden debate, where all we remembered were the first 15 minutes. This debate, she was a little tentative in that first 10 minutes, and then she turned on first the burners and then the after burners. I think to your point, Dylan, this is a campaign that's very as savvy as Trump was about social media in 2016 and the ubiquity of it and being out there all the time and being everywhere and getting how important that was.

This campaign, the Harris campaign, is very focused on. The thing about viral and memeable candidates, you have to be it. It's like Obama was a great grassroots fundraiser because he was that candidate. Hillary wasn't because she just wasn't. Bernie was. There's something about the candidate. It either works on these platforms or doesn't. She does. The kinds of things that the way that she talks, her prosecutorial mien just does, is so concise and crisp that it really works in very short form. You can find a lot of clippable things when she's really on fire, and she was on fire a lot of tonight. I will say there was an argument. If you looked at that New York Times Siena polling, where so many people in the country feel like they don't know her, One way to wrap her performance would be to say she didn't really get into a really media discussion of, Well, why did you change your mind on so many of these issues? Why have you changed over? But the truth is, Trump did not prosecute that case. It was one of the cases he was supposed to prosecute. Peter mentioned it. He didn't get into it.

I heard JD Vance saying on a postgame interview that, Well, he did it in his closing statement. It's like, Those are the things he was supposed to do. Tie her to Biden and call her a flip flopper and make her look like she was in authentic. And then she had a secret plan. One of the Marx brothers, I don't know, Groucho, Chico, Harpo. I really got people with Zepo and Gummo on Twitter tonight because people had forgotten all about Gummo, had forgotten about Zepo and Gummo. I'd like somebody to ask Trump which Marx he refers to when he calls her a Marxist. But I don't know. We'll get to this later. I don't know how many votes it's going to move. It's a very inelastic electorate. But on the metrics, I won't bury the lead. The dials in both campaigns knew the truth. By the end of this night, the real-time dials in the groups on both sides showed the same thing. She crushed it over the course of the night. And the Trump people knew it, and the Biden people, or the Harris people knew it. One side is a metaphorically chugging champagne, and the other is downing either malox or clonopin tonight at the end of this thing.

I want to play this piece of sound, though, where I think that there were the things kicked in. We'll play this when we got into the abortion debate, and that is where you first saw what we saw from Harris the rest of the night.

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, and they did exactly as he intended. Now, in over 20 states, there are Trump abortion bans which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care. In one state, it provides prison for life. Trump abortion bans that make no exception even for rape and incest, which understand what that means. A survivor of a crime, a violation to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That is immoral. One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree. The government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body. I have talked with women around our country. You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she's bleeding out in a car in the parking lot.

She didn't want that. Her husband didn't want that. A 12 or 13-year-old survivor of incest, being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. They don't want that.

I shouldn't be amazed anymore about some of the stupidity of Trump's lies, because he tells some lies that are so easily disproveable. But this one that he continues to stick with, which is everyone wanted Roe v Wade repealed. He's just said now a thousand times. I've never figured out the logic of why he does that. But Peter, I felt like you heard two sounds there. One, the sound of a gender gap, already a historic gender gap widening in that moment. Two, the sound of her finding her voice. And then three, shortly there after the sound of Donald Trump backing a bus up over JD Vance on the National Abortion Van. I'm like, Those are the three sounds that I heard after that. And that question did come up a lot in the postgame, which is, the man was asked twice to answer a simple question, Would you sign or repeal a National Abortion Van? And he will not answer it. I think his unwillingness to answer it speaks very loudly to people who are concerned that that is his agenda in the long run. I ask you how you think... I mean, this is one of the most important issues in the election.

It's driving a demographic thing that could be determinative. We know Trump's strength with men. We know her strength with women. Again, just focus on that moment in the debate and how it energized her and also what you think the political implications of it are, because really, that's like Trump in the mousetrap he built.

That's exactly right. I mentioned the Family Research Council thing earlier. I don't know, actually, if Trump has clear ideological beliefs, architecture around abortion necessarily. But it's clear that he's a little twisted up by, I think, the white evangelical base, which he probably shouldn't be. They're with him no matter what. But I did see Tony Perkins of the Affirmention Family Research Council on one of the Sunday shows last week. And he was saying, Trump's getting a little too wishy-washy on this stuff. We want him to stand up for life. And Trump is also keenly aware, to your point, John, that Kamal Harris has about a 13, 14 point lead with women right now, which is far surpassing Hillary Clinton and her margin with Trump back in 2016, and about on par Biden when it comes to women. But I think the abortion topic, and you mentioned earlier in the recording, really helped her turn on the afterburners. And this is also what happened in the vice president's office. The first couple of years, she was listless. Obviously, the whole borders are thing has been litigated to death. But she really, quote, found her voice when they handed her the abortion rights portfolio after Dobbs.

And that's when she hit the road, and she did a college tour, and she was all over the country in late 2022. Sorry, was it 2022? Yeah. Last year, and then earlier this year, and I spent time with her at one of these rallies she did in Phoenix. And it's just in her comfort zone. She knows how to talk about it. She knows how to talk to women. And she just felt extremely comfortable in that moment. And she was a little lucky that abortion was the second topic of the debate. It was the second ball that was teed up by the ABC moderators. And immigration came after that. And so, yeah, I think the one other point on this, too, is I did an event yesterday for Snapchat in Washington, and I was talking to a bunch of folks about Gen Z politics and whether Kamala Harris can make up this five-point gap she needs to make up with Gen Z men. Sorry. To hit the marks that maybe she needs to win. But I thought about another way. She can keep driving up numbers with college-educated women who are much more likely to vote and maybe offset some of those losses or deficits in other demographic groups, if she can just keep hammering this abortion issue, which is far and away her best issue in all the polls.

Yeah. I mean, if I may, she was never more effective than when she was prosecuting the case on abortion. And one thing that you mentioned, John, that I think about, there were areas in this debate, too, where she was asked a question and did not necessarily answer the question and chose instead to launch into some well-rehearsed rhetoric on a point and make it and make what was a very convincing and memorable case about, Pick your issue. But I think in doing so, she understood that, one, Trump wasn't going to get bogged by the specifics of the questions that he was asked either. I mean, obviously. In the Trump era, you lose a debate by getting put on your backfoot and trying to get into the weeds and answering the specific questions that the moderator asks you. And from the very beginning, from the very first question, she decided that she was going to take the question where she wanted it to go. And in every case, she said something. She said something that was in her comfort zone. She never got out of her comfort zone because she did what is like an age-old trick for anyone being interviewed.

You answer the question, not that you're asked, but the question that you want to answer.

Yes. And as Peter Hambi knows, that's one of the things they teach you when you go out to sell a book, which is, what are the things in the book you're trying to sell? Don't answer the dumb-ass questions that the cable hosts are asking you. Sell your book. What are the three best anecdotes in the book. Dylan, the thing you said earlier, I think, is also really... It's just really important. There's 50 million people watched the first Biden-Trump debate back in 2020 during COVID, when all we did was watch TV. It was like 70-some million. You go back further than that, the numbers were obviously even larger. There's going to be a big number on this debate. I'll ask you both to do your over-under on what you think the number is going to be on the live broadcast. But infinitely more, infinitely, not infinitely, exponentially more people are going to see this thing chopped up and chunked out on your favorite social platforms, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or Twitter or Snap. Take your pick. It's always been the case that what you do in a debate is you train people to bump the question, get off.

If the question is uncomfortable, bump off it and move to your safe ground. That's what you're always trying to teach candidates to do. And it's even more important in a microchunked meme environment, right? Because most people are just going to see the chunks. There's no one grading you on national forensics. Marcus of Queensbury rules here. Are you really staying totally linear and answering the question? Nobody gives a fuck. It's about what the message is you're trying to drive. And she knows how to do it, and she did it tonight.

I was going to say, John, obviously, she was the star. She showed up to play. She deserves the credit. But she had a bunch of people in debate prep. She's got a lot of voices in the room over the last few weeks. I don't know. Obviously, you can't give credit to one single person, but what connective tissue do you think there is between the people who are around her and the reps they were doing in her performance tonight? Or was this fated?

I think she took it seriously. I think she's good in this environment. I think she had a lot of material to work with. But also for years, having written about a lot of debate preps in my time, it is 100% the case. Someone will write a someday about what happened in Joe Biden's debate prep, and maybe it's like there was no debate prep that could save him. But people have given a lot of credit to Ron Klane, including me, for being a master debate prep person. But the truth of the little secret of many of Ron's debate preps was that his able second chair was Karen Dunn, who's a high-powered, very brilliant lawyer in Washington DC, who, although Ron was not in this debate prep, Karen ran this debate prep, and she effectively ran Hillary Clinton's debate prep alongside Ron, Biden's debate prep in 2020 alongside Ron, Barack Obama's two debate preps, all of them, the six of them, in fact, in 2012. She's the second most experienced and second most legendary debate prep person who doesn't get the credit that Ron used to because he was such a big personality. And I think she took over this debate prep.

She is now. And she knows how to do it. So she's a very impressive person. I want to take a break. We'll come back and get to what I I think of as in addition to that first clip we played, the second clip that defines this entire debate right after this with Pucksuper Friends, and we're back on Impolitin. 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 rallies. 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. She can't talk about that. People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That's because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. It happened three and a half years ago. What's going on here, you're going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject, 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. A lot of towns don't want to talk. It's 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 the pets of the people that live there.

This is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame. As far as the rallies are concerned, as far as the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It's a very simple phrase, make America great again. She's destroying this country, and if she becomes President, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success, will end up being Venezuela on steroids.

I mean, that's a hell of a run. And we didn't even play the part where she set the thing which was when she brought up, Let me take you to one of Donald Trump's rallies. And I got to say, there's a lot of things to say about this. But first of all, you knew that her bringing up the rally thing was going to trigger him. This is really where the trigger really started, right? And that was going to get him going. But even then, oh, boy, I didn't think you got quite this far. That answer is before we get to its racism and its vileness and its disgustingness, there's also just, he's like, there's going to It's going to be World War III. They're eating the dogs. At all the scale of sheer incoherence, it's an incredible thing. He goes from, My rallies, her rallies are fake. My rallies are great. There's going to be World War III, and they're eating the cats and dogs and the pets in Springfield. Guys, I think it's like, if you want to talk about the baiting strategy and how it works, that is the ur clip, right? And Dylan, I'll start with you just to say, I watched that and I thought, Man, if you want to see, talk about debate prep, as Peter was talking about before.

It's like, Okay, hey, let's trigger him and see where it goes. And he got off that plane with Laura Lumer, who's the source of this whole thing, he got off the plane here in Philly with Laura Lumer. As soon as you saw Laura Lumer get off the plane, I was like, Oh, boy, we're going to have it. But here we are. I mean, it's the Ghostbusters thing. It's a racist attack, but it's also so off the charts crazy. Crazy, the whole thing of it, it's hilarious. Anyway, I'll stop.

There are a lot of threads to pull here, but let's start with this.

Yes, 100 %.

The Rallies thing. Pick your sport, pick your fighting match. When the other team shows you their playbook, when Obama goes on stage at the DNC and makes what is effectively a penis joke about Trump's obsession with crowd sizes. They are telling you, the Democrats are telling you what they're doing. They are going to bait you because they know how to get under your skin. And the fact that Trump, in many ways, we spend so much time in the media talking about, oh, Trump's so hard to debate. You don't know what he's going to do. He's so unexpected, unpredictable. He will fall for this every time, even if it's so obviously the playbook. And so she goes with the rallies thing, and it's just like three, two, one. He's off talking about how no one goes to her rally is demonstrably not true. And then, yes, and then I think gets flummoxed and then starts falling back on these familiar scare Americans out of their minds talking points that vary from something as grandiose as World War III to something as conspiratorial and fake, frankly, as Haitian immigrants eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio. And in so doing, I think he makes himself incredibly vulnerable to sounding crazy, to Kamala basically letting him hang himself with his own rope, to the moderators having to come in and say, at a certain point, we can't let it be said on ABC news that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio.

So yeah.

And also David Mair asked him about immigration. Yes. And he had an out, and then he went back to the crowds and the dog.

Right. And Peter, I guess part of my thing here is, again, we'll loop back to this in a bunch of different ways. Who knows how much it will matter in the end in terms of votes it will actually move. But talk about wasted opportunity. That's like a lot of minutes that Donald Trump's ranting about shit that's not getting any work done for him in this debate. If If he was supposed to be tying her to Joe Biden's record or proving that she's a fraud and a phony on the flip-flopping stuff, he's not getting any of that work done there. All he's doing is just venting and ranting and saying stuff that even whether it doesn't hurt him a little, it doesn't hurt him a lot. But it doesn't help him. It's a massive opportunity cost.

Yeah. So Stephanie Rule just tweeted this. We're taping this after the debate. Kamal Harris spoke for 37.1 minutes. Amount of time she spoke, 23. Donald Trump spoke for 41.9 minutes. Amount of times he spoke, 39. So roughly at parity in terms of the amount of minutes talked, the amount of volume talking. But holy hell, what message came through in any of that? And there were times also when Harris was actually just content, and you could see it in the split screen, the energy of that split screen was pretty interesting. She was just sitting back and letting him talk. Again, that immigration answer I mentioned earlier. Just keep talking, Donald. Keep talking. And then also, I think we should reference some of this. I mean, these post debate snap holes are probably suspicious in certain ways. But the first debate that Biden-Atlanta disaster, the CNN Snap poll after that debate, 67 % of people said that Trump won. It was obvious to all of us. On Wednesday, last night, the CNN post debate poll, it was the inverse. 66 % of voters said that Kamal Harris won. So viewed through the looking glass of looking back on that Biden disaster, this was a disaster for Trump.

And all these focus groups, too, that are coming out after the debate, CNN, Washington Post, pretty overwhelmingly in favor of Kamala Harris.

Well, I'm glad you raised the Biden debate thing, Peter, because I thought about it all night. Republican consultant Alex Castillanos was the first who taught me that you should always watch a debate. If you can, you can watch it in real-time and then go back and watch it without the sound on and see what it projects with the sound off. And if you watch this debate with the sound off, you had Trump who refused to look at her through most of the debate, glowering, and when he was speaking, angry, hot throughout most of it. And her often, looking like laughing, smiling, whether she's speaking or not, laughing it off at him, looking at him all the time engaging. I've said before that I thought this was true at a more macro scale, but that the split screen with Donald Trump destroyed Joe Biden. In that debate that we talked about that night, the slack jaws. I remember John Stuart afterwards showing a four box of all Biden with his mouth hanging open, going, Did nobody in debate prep take any pictures and show him that this is what it was going to look like? Is it with his mouth like a gape?

I felt like tonight, the same split screen thing that hurt Biden when it came to his comparison with Trump, that split screen with Harris is now killing Trump. It's like she's younger, she's at ease, and he looks angry and pissed through the whole thing. And angry and pissed is not generally the way to win in presidential elections. And I wonder- Also, speaking of the last debate, John, you're in Philly now.

You were in Atlanta at the last one. The body language you see in the spin room after the debate is always very telling. You sent Dylan and This photo, and then you tweeted it, and it immediately went viral. This picture of Matt Gates and Steven Miller slump-shouldered, shuffling into the spin room, just looking sad and defeated. Our pal Tim Miller, who's now become a journalist, was at the spin room, too, and he interviewed Lindsay Graham. Lindsay Graham said the debate was a disaster for Donald Trump. I assume the body language for the Harris people in the spin room, from your perspective, was the exact opposite.

Man, I would say that Gavin Newsom's erection could be seen on Mars. I mean, it was like they were The crowds of reporters. It's really funny. The crowds of reporters in Atlanta were all around Biden people, but for other reasons. And this time, the crowds were strutting, cocks of the walk, so to speak. All those people down there were feeling the energy, the body in which everything was all exactly that, as you said, Peter. I guess, Dylan, I do ask that question to go back to the split screen, which is I think that... I'm always struck that Trump's, We are a failing nation, that all the darkness, the apocalyptic end times rhetoric, that there is obviously a big market for that in America. But that wasn't the case for George W. Bush. It wasn't the case for for Raul Reagan. It wasn't the case for Bill Clinton. It wasn't the case for Barack Obama. These are hopeful candidates in various ways. And I wonder whether just the raw visceral thing. In a Biden debate, Trump was calm. He almost looked mournful watching Biden's struggle. For the first 30 minutes, which is all that mattered, he later turned into an asshole.

But the first 30 minutes, he was quietly watching Biden not be able to perform and almost looked sympathetic to him. And that was Then again, it worked Trump's favor. In this case, I think everything about the visuals of this have helped create those Instapoles that Peter's talking about.

Well, I mean, look, and we know this going back to Kennedy Nixon, the body language, the visuals matter so much, obviously. And one, I think Trump's demeanor and his temperament in this debate and the way he came off visually was a result of Harris getting under his skin. I mean, in many ways, I think there was probably a point at which Trump, during the first debate, during which Trump came to the conclusion that Biden was really falling apart and then just let him hang himself and was probably reminded by his advisors before going on to keep calm and try and project some semblance of presidential behavior. I think the flip side happened here. I think Harris came out with a strategy strategy to basically try and emphasize the point that anything coming out of Trump's mouth was ridiculous to look like that. And then that happened, and I think it made it easier for her. One thing I would just say, though, just hearing you talk about the visual element of this, it goes without saying the degree of difficulty for her in this moment as the first woman of color coming out is so much much harder.

She has to look authoritative and presidential without playing into the racist stereotypes of the angry Black woman. She has to project optimism and hope while still addressing what are very serious and grave issues and pressing him on abortion, and January sixth, and all these things. She pulled that off masterfully. And I think one thing that happened here, she showed... We know how weak she can be in interviews. She can be very bad in interviews. I think that she barely made it through that CNN interview. But her history as a prosecutor, I think, has actually conditioned her to be a much more effective debater, perhaps more than even her own team gave her credit for. I think there was probably a lot of nail-biting when she was walking out on stage and a lot of celebrating after the fact, as you mentioned. But I think in retrospect, that Her best moments as a politician were when she was in that prosecutorial role. And I think this is such an obvious setup for her to embody that here again.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I do think people look back on that Tulsi Gabbard moment in the second debate in 2020, where Harris got... She heard something she'd never heard before in her political career, which was an audience of Democrats turned against her, and she didn't know what to do. In California, there had never been, and she never faced really hostile crowd in her entire career. And when Tulsi laid into her on foreign policy, she crumbled right there on stage. And I think that that memory and that video haunted some people in Harris world. Not that they didn't think that she'd grown, but just that when you've seen something like that happen before, you get nervous about it. Obviously, the interview thing you pointed out, the Lester Holt interview, is the most iconic interview of a place where she just really, really, really, really folded. But tonight, Wait, that did not happen. I want to play... Donald Trump got asked about his comments about her race, and I'm playing this because it seems to me the perfect illustration of a moment where Trump's advisors had told him, just as Harris's advisors are like, Let's not talk about race, Trump's advisors are telling him, Do not go back into the thing where you're going to question her racial identity.

It does not help us. It is not good. And yet, instead, what we got What was this? Mr. President, you recently said a vice President Harris, I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black.

I want to ask a bigger picture question here tonight.

Why do you believe it's appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?

I don't, and I don't care. I don't care what she is. I don't care. You make a big deal out of something. I couldn't care less. Whatever she wants to be is okay with me.

But those were your words.

I I don't know. I don't know. I mean, all I can say is I read where she was not black, that she put out, and I'll say that. And then I read that she was black, and that's okay. Either one was okay with me. That's up to her.

I read that she was black. I mean, it's like he's just wrestling with the demons in his head and the instructions that he had in what they call debate prep, Peter, and losing.

Yeah. I mean, there's no way around it. Just by the way, I I think this is such a net loser for Donald Trump talking about this for a reason I just mentioned, which is I'm the guy who likes to cover Gen Z, and I think about it a lot. A very interesting thing about this Gen Z voting demographic is a lot of them don't remember the crazy, crazy, crazy, outrageous 2015, 2016 era Trump stuff. I wrote about this for Puck, called it Trumpnesia. Young people just don't remember the stuff that we were all hair on fire about nine years ago. They do remember They're a pretty good economy. They do remember their finances were a little bit better. And by the way, they think the state of the world was also fine. Two things they actually don't like about Donald Trump are his position on climate change and his position on race relations. Right. Like young people, even like young Trump supporters, they like to think that race relations... Sorry. They want race relations to be better than they were under Donald Trump. So just bringing that up is such a net negative and plays not only into Kamala Harris's strengths, I think.

She doesn't talk about her identity very much. But again, it's just a distraction from the two goddamn things he needed to talk about tonight, which is prices in the economy and border security. So any moment spent talking about immigrants eating dogs or Kamala Harris's race or relitigating January sixth or saying, I actually won the election again or hemming and hawing over abortion and dobs. Just minutes lost. Of those 41 minutes he talked, minutes lost.

Can I piggyback on something Peter said real quick?

Please, please.

Yeah. By we, I mean, those of us in what I think of as traditional media, or at least who come out of that world, we are so used to Trump, and we've lived through Trump for the last decade. And we know a lot of the things that have struck us as being discordant with what we think of as the history of normal American politics. But Peter, when you talk about the way you're thinking about it at Snapchat, or you think about younger generations and what they remember and the younger generations who who was Tupac? It is so effective to come come out and remind people about all of these different aspects of Trump that we have grown so used to. So there are probably a lot of people, my guess is, in younger generations, who don't know about the housing issue in New York, where he blocked people from getting housing because they were Black, about the Central Park Five. There are probably voters out there in 2024 who don't really have a full grasp of the birtherism thing going back 10 years ago and more. And on a similar thing, even we're all familiar with what Mark Millie said about Trump, what everyone in Trump's own cabinet said about him.

There are other voters who are probably, younger voters who are probably not familiar with that. And one thing that struck me with Harris coming out and just going through the attacks and the prosecution that she wanted to go through, she also just brought up some very familiar things that Trump has done that one struck us as crazy that we've now grown jaded to, which I think voters who are either younger or who are not paying as close of attention or maybe you have shorter memory spans needed to be reminded of. And I think that, too, was effective.

Yeah, we in the political media overestimate how much people actually know about any of these topics. And by the way, that includes me who didn't know until tonight that Kamala Harris owns a gun.

Yeah, me neither.

Me neither. Who knew? They might want to mention that a little earlier.

I can't imagine those shady people out of Brentwood.

Well, back in 2019, when they called her Kamala the Cop, it wouldn't have been a great thing. Well, I do happen to own a sidearm. She would have thought Elizabeth Ward would actually physically eat her on the debate stage. And Peter, to your point about Gen Z and race, it's like one of the things, and you know more about Gen Z than I do, and I'm an old man, but one of the things that I note about them when it comes to gender fluidity and their attitudes towards race, it's that they are actually somewhat post-racial in the sense that they are, not because of some presidential leadership thing, but in the same way that their attitudes towards a lot of identity issues are just fluid and not... Trump wants to put everything into a box. Is she black? Is she Indian? And the answer is, she's both, you fucking moron. And there's people that have been of mixed race descent. That's all America is, is people like that. And you're acting like... And for a lot of kids, they're like, You're speaking Swahili, dude. You sound like you're from Mars. It just makes him seem old and out of touch with a basic reality that they all have internalized in a pretty profound way in their youth.

That it's one of the reasons why this- That was an important note in the Taylor Swift Instagram post as well. She talked about Harris being a fighter for women, and IVF and women's health, but she slipped in there also for LGBTQ rights. That was an important thing. Yeah, you're right. Like, identity.

It's identity fluidity.

It's fluidity across the spectrum. The unsettled nature identity for Gen Z is settled. It's a core fact.

It's a core fact. Right. Totally. I want to play one last thing, and then we'll take another break, and then we'll come back and talk about working the reps and some of that stuff that Dylan raised early on. But the last thing I want to play of Harris is it naturally fades into this, which is her answer when we got in January sixth. Talk again about something that every Trump advisor was like, Don't fucking go out there and talk about how you won the election in 2020. I'm sure you guys saw the other day when Trump said that if Jesus Christ came back and counted the votes, he would have won California in 2020. Peter and Dylan, you both live in California. I think you'll agree with me that that's not just unhinged. That's like grounds for institutionalization. You're like, That's out of your fucking mind, right? So he gets into it again and he says, Yeah, well, I actually won the election in 2020. Of course I did, which is a big strategic error on his part. And then, Harris here was, I think, great. She gave just a really good response at both the level of specifics and at the level of high-level thematics.

Let's take a listen to that.

I was at the Capitol on January sixth. I was the vice president-elect. I was also an acting senator. I was there. On that day, the President of the United States incited a violent mob to attack our nation's capital, to desecrate our nation's capital. On that day, 140 law enforcement officers were injured, and some died. And understand, the former President has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason. So for everyone watching who remembers what January sixth was, I say, We don't have to go back. Let's not go back. We're not going back.

So, Peter, she's not made the central, the defense of democracy is central to campaign as Joe Biden did. But in this case, she went in there, and that was like a greatest hits of Trump, of some of the most dangerous, terrible shit Trump has done and said, that a lot of mainstream voters, not particularly liberal ones, but people all over the country, were found like, cringeworthy at a minimum and totally alarming and terrifying at the worst. How do you think she handled that question there?

I thought she did really well. It flowed from her country first convention speech, and I think it does It hits two kinds of people. It hits your MSNBC resistance moms. And it also hits, and she shouted out, John McCain and the Cheneys. It hits those moderate, swing voter, suburban dad types who might be on the fence. And that New York Times Santa poll you mentioned, and it's not just that poll, but others show that one of Harris's biggest challenges and vulnerabilities is that people continue to see her as too liberal. And so she's able to thread together this democracy message and sound like Joe Biden. But I also think there's a patriotism element to it that is smart and appeals to those people out there. Maybe it's just Sarah Longwell and 10 other people, but maybe they decide the election. The people who do hold John McCain in high esteem, who do think that Liz Cheney is brave and patriotic. And I thought she did pretty good.

We'll take this break. We'll come back and talk about working the reps on Impolitic with John Almeida. And we are back with the Puck Super Friends talking about fight night in Philly. I said before the break that we were going to get back into the media, into Dylan's territory. So we're going to do that by listening to two clips in sequence. They took place, in fact, in real-time, back-to-back also. This was all playing out on Fox News. First, they were talking about the debate with the estimable veteran, conservative journalist, Brit Hume. And then it goes straight into Sean Hannity's take on the debate. So we'll listen to that right now, right back to back, Brit Hume and Sean Hannity on Fox News. Make no mistake about it. Trump had a bad night. He rose to debate repeatedly when she baited him, something I'm sure his advisors had begged him not to do. In the first debate, when Biden attacked him, he just kept his cool and kept going.

In this debate, he rose to a debate, and we heard so many of the old grievances that we'd long thought that Trump had learned were not winners politically.

There they all were.

Talked about how he didn't lose the election and all that.

My sense is that she came out of in pretty good shape.

Now, how long this will last is anybody's guess.

But for tonight, at least, this was pretty much her night. You're saying she had a good night? I'm saying she certainly did.

I think the biggest loser in the debate, and we talked about this pre-debate, is ABC. The fact that we didn't get to fundamental strong positions that Kamala Harris had taken on very deep and profound issues involving the economy and immigration and ending private health care and defund and dismantle. There was a lot of cliché, a lot of rehearsal that I saw in her performance. Okay, that's fine. That was anticipated. There were a lot of lies that she told about abortion, about Project 2025, about gun confiscation, and that was frustrating on a lot of fronts. The fact that we don't know if she still supports free housing, health care, education, and sex change operations for illegal immigrants is unfathomable to me after an hour and a half debate. Does she still support defund, dismantle, no bail laws? Do we have an answer on no fracking and no drilling. She didn't say that in 2000. Even CNN fact-checked her after her 16 minute and 29 second debate. We don't have answers on the economy. Bidenomics being a great success. President Trump, I thought, was on the issue of, Okay, three and a half years you've been vice President, why haven't you gotten these things done?

And in many, many ways, that pass that she's gotten has been the greatest disservice, I think, tonight to the American people. That's on ABC Disney. That really shouldn't be the other candidate's job to be challenging them, especially when you have muted microphones.

So fucking crazy on so many levels, the Hannity thing. The muted microphone, just to start at the end there, which is like what Trump wanted was the muting microphone. So he's now bitching about the muted microphones. And on top of everything else, the idea, the core element of this, which is, they didn't fact check Kamal Harris enough because she told a lot of lies. I mean, I just find it amazing that anybody with a straight face, and I know Sean is, he's Sean, right? But that's the argument they're going to make. And we heard it all over the place. Jd Vans said the same thing. They didn't fact check her enough on these various lies that she told. Trump I guarantee you this night, if we totaled up the things that were questionable, factually, that she said there would be some for sure, and there would be exponentially more on Trump's part, because he said a million things that no one... They went back, and we'll I'm not going to talk about the fact-checking thing, Dylan, but they went back on him on a couple of things. But I heard almost every answer him say things that were demonstrably untrue.

So I ask you, is it not a sign that you know you've lost the debate when JD Vance, Sean Hannity your biggest allies are out there basically saying, The biggest loser of the night was ABC News that didn't do enough of a good job destroying Kamala Harris when our candidate was incapable of executing his game plan.

100 %. And just get comfortable and bear with me for a sec because I want to go through a couple of points here.

Go, go, go crazy, bro.

Now that you're in my house, pull up a chair. Okay. So first, there is an agreement and an expectation going into debate one a CNN debate, that it is not the role of the media to press the candidates. It is the role of the candidates to press the candidates. And Trump loyalists, the Sean Hannities of the world, are Totally content with that. And they come out of the CNN debate saying that the debate was great. Cnn did a fine job because Trump won. And they say it was not the moderator's job to press them. Going into debate two, ABC says a A slightly different version of the same thing, which is not we will not fact check, but our role here is to facilitate a debate. And fundamentally, it's the same premise, which is it is the role of the candidates to press one another because it's the candidates who are running for President. And it is, of course, to your point, Trump and his campaign that wanted muted microphones. And now that Trump has lost the debate because he failed to stay focused, he failed to stay on message, he failed to prosecute the case against Kamala Harris, now they're bitching and moaning about it.

It is inconsistent. That is the most generous thing I can say about that argument. It is grossly inconsistent. Now, second thing to your point about the lies, There is frustration. They are working the refs right now and saying that it was a three-on-one debate because there were, I think, three instances I can think of in which David Muralin, Lindsay Davis, fact-check Trump. Now, I want to just go through the three that I remember. I believe it was just these three, and here is what they are. They told him that, in fact, it is illegal to kill babies. Two, that Haitian migrants are not... That there is not any proof that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. And then three, that despite what Trump said, crime is not rising in this country, crime is actually coming down in this country. So you take those three things.

Pause for one second now, Dylan. Just hold on one sec, because I want to play one of those examples that you just listed of the fact-checking. I want to play the one on abortion just so we can all hear it as it happened.

And I give tremendous credit to those six justices.

There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born. That's what the fact check sounded like on that one. Okay.

So now let's come out. There There are a lot of people whose job it is to fact check, and one of them is Daniel Dale at CNN. And the fact checks, whether you're looking at CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, usually fall into three categories. Things get ranked as being an outright lie or fabrication, or a misleading statement, or a statement that lacked context. In the immediate aftermath of the debate, Daniel Dale, and my guess is this would correlate to the Post and the Times we can see, Daniel Dale found that just focusing on the lies, the obvious lies, Trump made at least 33 of them. Harris made at least one. So if you are going to go out and decide that your argument coming into the spin room is going to be that this was unfair and the media tipped the scales because they pointed out that it is illegal to kill babies and that there's no evidence that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. That is a losing debate. It is a losing debate, and it is a grossly unfair characterization of what, by and large, from David Muir and Lindsay Davis and the ABC News team.

And believe me, you read my column, I go really, really hard on ABC News. They got a lot of reasons to be upset with me. But they put forward a professional, responsible, and commendable debate tonight. And the effort by by the right to spin it is just a sign of what was demonstrably a bad night for President Trump.

I was just going to say, I'll tell you, people at ABC News will definitely concur with Dylan's view that they go hard on, that he goes hard on them. I can confirm that for my friends at ABC News. Go ahead, Peter.

Sorry. Two quotes tonight from one Republican and one bro, who's probably a lean Trumper, jumped out at me that invalidate the criticisms of ABC News and their moderators. One was Scott Jennings on CNN, who said, Immediately after the debate I was watching, It's hard to complain about the refs when you aren't making your own jump shots. So there's that. And then two, Dave Portnoy, again, not necessarily a Republican, but someone from the manosphere and a sports guy who probably knows a thing or two about working the refs or complaining about the refs, said throughout the night that the moderators were biased against Kamala Harris. That was his insinuation on Twitter. But he also said, I don't think this is going well for Trump so far at all. Probably doesn't help that it's a tag team match, but yeah, not great. In other words, even if the moderators were ganging up on Trump and helping Harris, Trump still lost. Because as any sports fan knows, you can complain about the refs. With most exceptions, the quarterback has to get out there and throw touch downs. You got to score points. You can't just whine about the refs.

Look, and of course, the other thing is on the other side, and Dylan, you guys can answer this, I think, relatively quickly. But the ref working was happening prior to the debate from the left, Parker Malloy, who came up with a very nice phrase on a social media person, who came up with this nice phrase, sanewashing, that Trump gets away, that he's lower, that he's defined deviancy down so far now that we don't call him on all of his crazy shit. And they were like, they were ready to come for ABC News tonight for sanewashing Trump. I think you guys, on the basis of what you're saying, is that they did. I I think in the end, I think the verdict is going to be that David Muir and Lindsay did a good job, a relatively credible job of keeping a debate that would be hard to keep on the rails on the rails. I think they are not going to get nailed for sanewashing, not because they fact-checked Trump so much, but that they did it on a few really egregious things. And then they let Harris do her job throughout the rest of the debate, which I think is the standard they set for themselves.

And obviously, part of the reason why the left won't attack them is because Harris won the debate so clearly. But that, I think, is the verdict, right, on the media tonight.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think that's absolutely right. I think that's absolutely right.

And I would just- All the thirsty gaze on Twitter who loved David Vier, are posting pictures of him.

Look, another thing they did is they didn't insert themselves. It wasn't like you You arrived at this moment where all of a sudden there was this big back and forth between Trump and David Muir that took up 30, 60, 90 seconds, right? These were very easy points to make. It's illegal to kill children. It's illegal to kill babies. It's a very quick and easy point to make. And I think that the... Look, just to the point about what this post game working of the refs, I would encourage any sane person that if David Muir and Lindsay Davis had not said, You can't kill babies. No one's eating immigrants and crime is actually going down, not up, if this debate would have been demonstrably different for Trump.

I think you just said no one's eating immigrants, which I think is really awesome. Well, that might be in the next debate. A hundred %. Okay, we're going to wrap this up here, and I'm going to ask you guys these two couple of big questions. So there are three questions, actually. But one's related to Harris, one's related to Trump, and one's related to whether any of this matters. Peter, I mentioned the Times a Siena poll, and that one of the things that would have been on your list of strategic objectives if you were Kamla Harris was to get the country... The country doesn't feel they know you that well. The country thinks you're too liberal. A lot of people in the polling show that, and that you I want to address those concerns. There's another thing, though, that I kept hearing from people in Harris's world, which was a thing that was enunciated to me at the end of the debate by one of the biggest Democratic donors in the country, who I quoted in our last session after the Biden debacle in, I didn't quote them by name, but I said I was getting all these donor people saying, How do we get Biden out, basically, and what a catastrophe was.

This same donor wrote to me tonight. I checked in and said, What did you think? And he went directly to what I knew was really one of their key objectives, which was command. And the way that he wrote this was he said... He wrote Bill Clinton says the American people need to see you as President. Tonight, I believe they see her as President. He looks rattled and unhinged. He's a pabulum, but he says there's a plausibility test, and that the It was a plausibility test of, Can you look at this person on stage and say, I can see that person in the big chair, and that his attitude was, She commanded the stage. That's what people remember. She was in command, he was not in command. And that's really as much as do I get them to know me, biography, how do I answer my flip flops? That's what people will take away from this debate, is that she owned it, and that's why she's the winner in the end. Do you agree with that?

I totally agree with that. This was like a job interview for her. This was a credibility test as much as it was a debate with an opponent. She had to demonstrate because she's really been thrust into this position in a short manner of time that she could plausibly play the role of President of the United States. And at least tonight, I think she showed that. And getting up there and not talking that in great detail about your issues, I actually think her answer on values is pretty good. People wear their partisan jerseys, and they're voting on whether your values align with them or not. But she did look like she was on offense. And I think your donor friend was absolutely right. Certainly more than Joe Biden.

And that's the funny thing, of course, in another way in which was like this was like the mirror image debate from the Atlanta disaster for Biden. And Dylan, I ask you about Trump. There's been some ebbing, for sure, in the momentum that Harris had coming, that she had for the four weeks leading into the convention. And we've seen that some of that has stalled a little bit as it naturally was going to. She couldn't on that rocket ride forever. But it's the case that when I would think about the way the race was going to play out for the next eight weeks, there was one big question, which is, what's going to change the dynamic of this race? She could really fuck up in a big moment. She could still do that in the future, but this was the big moment where the most people were going to be watching. The other was, some external event could happen, attacked by some foreign policy disaster, Martian invasion in Northern Virginia, something like that, that she'd have to deal with, either economic or national security. Then the other was that Trump would find discipline. This is what Republicans have been counting on for a long time, that when he needs to, he finds it.

He found it the last two weeks in 2016. He's been able to rally. And he's been able to rally and become a disciplined candidate. He would have to change and run a disciplined, focused, rigorous campaign against her. My contention is that in the last couple of years, Donald Trump has lost the capacity to do that. He He is suffering from many of the different, but similar issues with mental acuity that Joe Biden was. And we're seeing it. He is more fucked up, more unhinged, and more unable to prosecute a disciplined, focused campaign than he's ever been. And he's never been great at it, but he had moments. He doesn't have it anymore. And I think this debate is, to me, I think if you're hoping for Donald Trump to become a disciplined candidate and you watch this debate, you would say, You should give up that chance. That's not going to be the thing that's going to eventually change the dynamics of the race. It doesn't mean he can't win, but it's not going to be because he suddenly finds focus.

No, that's right. And let's be clear, he does not have the issues that Biden has, right? I mean, He projects more energy. He is more- Yes.

He's not frail.

He doesn't shuffle on the stage. He's not frail. But there is a... I don't know if the word is crazy, but there is just this unhinged factor. And by being so effective in getting under his skin and forcing that side of him, it became harder and harder for him to be disciplined. And there were moments, there were flashes where you saw it. In fact, this might be a controversial opinion, but as much as his initial answer to the January sixth question, he brought up all these things his advisors didn't want him to bring up, he did have this moment where he pivoted, I think somewhat successfully, to, why aren't we prosecuting these other criminals? Why aren't we prosecuting these people? Talking about liberal cities that he had believed had gone to rot. And why aren't we prosecuting those people? And that's actually a talking point that I think will resonate with the base and could resonate with people who are concerned about things like crime and immigration, whatnot. But as the debate went on, he got so distracted. And you see it in the debate, you see it in his rallies, and that was why it was effective.

Here is bringing up the Hannibal Leclerc stuff. His inability to stay focused and stay disciplined is going to be a real vulnerability for him going into these next two months.

I was happy to hear that he blamed Nancy Pelosi instead of Nikki Haley for what happened at the Capitol on January sixth. I was expecting him to start saying Nikki Haley. That was the one win for Donald Trump tonight in that area. Guys, does it matter in the end? You can Peter, you'll go first. Dylan, you'll go second. Do we think that a lot of votes get moved here? I heard people before the debate, the Democratic side, saying that this would be like Reagan in '80, where it was very, very close up to the one debate that they had. And then Reagan just eventually pulled away and won the race easily in '80. It's a very different country in terms of ideological polarization and how much is baked in and how inelastic the electorate is. But is this a thing that chips Is the momentum back in Harris's favor? Is this the thing that we're going to look back on election day and say, This was a game changer? Not to use the phrase for which I get paid. I have to pay myself for the use of my own trademark. But is this the thing that we go, Oh, yeah, this really is...

I heard even Jonathan Karl was on ABC going, This is maybe the most consequential debate in the history of American politics. Is that right in terms of who actually wins the election?

So again, I'm watching the CNN Snap, pull out the corner of my eye, something like 15 % of Trump voters say they're maybe reconsidering who they're going to vote for. I think the thing she had to do was more stabilize. She has, what, 2.8 lead in the national average. And she just had to make sure she didn't fumble that ball away. She's maintaining leads in five out of the seven swing states right now, according to the averages. So she didn't fumble the ball. That's good. And And I also think, yeah, she needed to... I think she excited a lot of Democrats. I think Taylor Swift coming in and saying, I endorse Kamala Harris, but also make sure you're registered to vote. That's good. And I think just shoring up those weak spots. Remember, she's not hitting... And by the way, she might assemble a different coalition than Joe Biden, so we shouldn't compare apples to apples here, apples to oranges, whatever the phrase is. But she's not hitting Biden's numbers in certain key groups, black voters, young people, et et cetera. And so she still has to get those people off the couch. Biden's numbers are- But it's not like swinging the electorate.

Biden's numbers from...

Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say Biden's numbers from 2020, you mean not... She's exceeded Biden's numbers in 2024 with those groups, but now hasn't hit his 2020 numbers yet.

Yeah, I'm sorry. Biden 2020. The Biden 2020 numbers, she still needs to shore up support in certain demos, black voters, young voters, Latinos, et cetera. And if she can get those people off the couch. I think tonight was a win. I don't think you're going to see any massive swing or any massive bounce. But I can see her getting a one-point bounce nationally out of this. But the times we live in are too partisan. I just think she had to not fumble the ball as she approaches the red zone, and I don't think she did it tonight at all. I think she got her first down.

I'm just imagining this conversation as they got the Taylor Swift endorsement lined up where they were like, okay.

They knew they had it, too.

If she fucks up, we'll have Taylor that we can roll that out, and that will cushion the blow. We didn't have that for Joe Biden. But if she wins the debate, double whammy.

Right. Although I almost wonder, do you stretch it out? Do you let Kamala have her night, and then do you do this a week later when the early voting starts? But you guys are the political animals, and you understand coalitions and constituencies and what's going to move undecided voters. And I'm over here. I'm the guy who doesn't understand how you're still undecided at this point. But let me just speak from a media perspective here, which is if you are out there undecided, or if you're curious, you're Kamala curious or you're Trump curious, anywhere on the fence. And my guess is part of what you needed was a vibe check and a, can I see this person as President? It Like, does this person make sense to me? Would I be comfortable with this? Can I envision this? Everything about Kamala Harris's performance tonight. And I wish our colleague Lauren Sherman could be here even to talk about the sartorial choices here. But she was as presidential as she could look. She was smiling. She was authoritative. She had command of the stage. She was the one who walked over and shook Trump's hand when Trump wasn't going to walk over and shake her hand, which was big on the optics scale.

She was well-lit. You know what I mean? I mean, just well done up. Everything about this did as much as you possibly could, I think, to sell her, to sell Americans who might have questions or misgivings, to sell them on the idea that she could occupy the office of the presidency as the first woman, as the first woman of color. And And I think if you didn't see that on stage tonight, you are either so firmly aligned with the Republican Party or with Trump, or you just aren't someone who's going to tolerate a woman or a woman of color being in the office.

Guys, it's late, and the Puck Super Friends have risen to the occasion once again. For anybody who doesn't know, the three of us are going to... We're all going to see each other actually face to face for the first time in a while. We have what Peter likes to call an onsite-off site at Puck headquarters over the next couple of days, which will include a staff dinner tomorrow night, after which my only real hope is that we don't end the night by saying, as Donald Trump said, tonight, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets. If we can avoid that outcome tomorrow night, I'll consider the whole thing a giant win for all of us in the Puck Empire. Dylan Byers, Peter Hambi, two wicked smart fellows, and also generous with their time and insights. Thank you guys for doing this.

Thank you, John. Looking forward to seeing you in the flesh.

Thank you for having us, John.

Inpolitic with John Heilman is a Puck podcast in partnership with Odyssey. Thanks again to my partners and fellow Puck super friends, Dylan Byers and Peter Hamby, for activating in the aftermath of the debate. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow InPolitic with John Heilman and share us, rate us, and review us on the free Odecy app wherever you happen to bask in the splendor of the podcast universe. I'm John Heilman, your Cruise Director and the Chief Political Columnist for Puck, where you can read my writing every Sunday night, plus the work of all my terrific colleagues by going to puk. News/impolitic, that's puk. News/impolitic, and subscribing. Two of those colleagues from Puk, John Kelly and Ben Landee, are the executive producers of this podcast. Lori Blackfoot is our senior executive booking producer. Ali Clancy is our executive assistant. Jd Crowley and Jenna Weis-Burman are our indispensable overseers, and Guardian Angels at Odyssey, and the one and only, Bob Tabor, is the straw that stirs the drink. Flawlessly producing, editing, mixing, and mastering this show. We'll see you next time, everyone. And as always, Namaste.