The Moderators, The Candidates, The Reaction – Top 3 Takeaways – September 11th, 2024

By a margin of 63% to 37% viewers of the debate thought Harris outperformed Trump

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
These are Brian Mudd's top three takeaways. The moderators, the candidates,
the reaction. My top three takeaways as we break down
the presidential debate always the three factors that I weigh
when I am taking in these debates, and my top
one is the moderators. One of the biggest storylines ahead

(00:25):
of presidential debates is the role the moderators playing the debate.
Moderators that are like referees and umpires. If we come
out of a debate talking about them as factoring into
the result, you got a problem. And much like the
first debate, there are plenty of concerns for Team Trump
and his supporters heading into this debate. According to the

(00:46):
Media Research Center, ABC's World News Tonight program featuring David
Moyer and Lindsay Davis, the debate moderators, they happen to
have the most biased news coverage of any network the
most bias in the MRC study from July twenty first,
when Kamala Harris entered the race, through September sixth, one

(01:10):
hundred percent of the coverage of Kamala Harris as positive.
During the same time, ninety three percent of the news
coverage of Donald Trump was negative. To do that both
of those things, you would have to go out of
your way to make sure you were providing glowing coverage
of Kamala Harris while you're going out of your way
to be negative about Trump. I mean, just accidentally, you

(01:32):
might have those numbers that would be a bit more
moderate than those two extremes. As I mentioned in yesterday's takeaways,
there have been several knittable examples of blatant anti Trump
bias by ABC News and both of the debate moderators,
alongside many blatantly pro Biden Harris examples in their news

(01:53):
coverage and interviews. For these reasons, it was reasonable to wonder,
one how would questions be framed now? The answer was inconsistent.
They were framed in an inconsistent manner, but significantly one sided.
What I mean by that is the line of questioning
was pointed in both directions. At times, they were often

(02:15):
aimed at keeping Trump on the defensive. Also, unlike in
the first CNN debate, the moderators regularly interjected their idea
fact checking, but only against Trump. The moderators so called
fact checked Trump five times to zero for Hairs five

(02:36):
to nothing. There in terms of making themselves directly part
of the story, and that wasn't due to Harris's answers
being entirely accurate either. Second takeaway, would the focus of
the questions beyond the issues that matter to us or

(02:57):
to the moderators we start getting into the January sixth
threat to democracy? Well, the answer was that the early
focus was on issues that matter to us economy, abortion, border,
before turning hard to January sixth, the threat to democracy
election denialism. As much time was spent in those three

(03:18):
areas or more than on the economy itself or on
the border itself, that is is obviously something that was
an agenda of the moderators and of a particular leftist
narrative of the Harris F. Harris's campaign. It's not what

(03:39):
the average American at home is thinking about. They do
not think about January sixth, They do not think about
Trump being a threat to democracy. They are not sitting
there thinking about the twenty twenty election denialism. Third takeaway,
would Kamala Harris be properly pressed on her lack of
public access since becoming the presumptive Democrat nominee, her failure

(04:01):
to provide comprehensive policy plans so that the Americans better
understand what it is that she stands for, and for
her stated flip flops on key issues and known positions
that she'd articulated and voted for both as a senator
and vice president. The answer is only mildly. Harris was
pressed on her flip flops. She was not meaningfully pressed

(04:22):
on any of the other concerns. Four. Would the moderators
let the candidates speak during their allocated time or would
they intervene and or cut off mics and kind of
just interfere that way? And the answer is yes. For
the most part, they let the ground roll stick, although
early on they did leave Harris's mic on while Trump

(04:44):
was talking, allowing her to cut them off. I don't
know what that was about. But more than anything unbalanced,
this debate just was not moderated. As the first scene
of debate was. The moderators were not part of the
story coming out of that first debate. This time around,
the moderators were a significant part of the story, routinely interjecting,

(05:07):
but one sidedly, and numerous times the debate took on
the field of a three to one matchup with Trump
competing against Harris and the moderators. Second takeaway today the candidates.
Could the non battle tested Kamala Harris stand up to
scrutiny for against the far more seasoned presidential candidate in

(05:28):
Donald Trump for ninety minutes, Yes, with the assistance of
the debate moderators, she did. Would Donald Trump be able
to stay on message or would he engage in personal
attacks which Harris was hoping he would do? No, he
often did not stay on message. He did end up
taking the debate and at times made it a bit personal.

(05:53):
He started out well in this regard on the economy,
which is probably the high point of the debate. If
you just took that segment on the economy, Trump probably
came out on the better end of it. From there,
he often and seemingly more progressively played into Harris's hand.
The next one, I say in Jess, but actually it's

(06:14):
part instructive as well. Would Kamala cackle, as she's been
known to do when she's uncomfortable with the situation or
question something, to try to fire a little extra time
and figure her way out of it. And the answer
is yes, but only briefly. There was one Kamala cackle
that made an appearance. She did catch herself and was

(06:37):
able to generally keep her composure in the debate. Would
Trump take the twenty twenty election bait or focus on
the future? Oh boy, when the bait was thrown out there,
when he was pressed on it, he took it. He
took it. Would Kamala be convincing in her recent messaging

(06:58):
aimed at sounding more moderate than the ultra progressive. She's
historically been a senator whose voting record was only zero
zero point three percent different than Bernie Sanders while she
was in the Senate. I don't know how that's going
to come out. It was clear she had a series
of scripted answers, and there are a couple of things
about that. She presented those scripted answers well. And the

(07:23):
best way I can describe this is, I'll always talk
to people, you know, in terms of trying to be relatable,
to talk to people the way that you talk to people.
I mean, Trump, for all of his brashness, it's Trump.
You know, there's no pretense, it's not scripted answer, it's
not you know lines that it's just it's Trump and

(07:44):
he's he's talking to you. Maybe not connecting with you
because often he was talking to the debate moderators, for example,
which she's been inclined to do historically. In Kamala's case,
when you get into like the I'm doing the acting
thing because I'm you know, reeling off my well crafted
scripted answer, there's an element of not connecting with people

(08:05):
on that, even though the messaging was delivered well. Would
Trump keep the focus on the Biden Harris administration's policy
failures juxtaposed to his successful agenda as president or would
he allow his persona to become the focus of the debate.
Trump did a pretty good job of prosecuting the case

(08:26):
against the current administration, though there was a bit too
much of a focus on Biden, specifically at times, as
Harris made a point of saying she is not Joe
Biden and Trump is not running against Joe Biden. What
would Kama's closing argument be now it was an effort
to distinguish herself from both Biden and Trump as an optimistic,

(08:49):
new generational leader. Would Trump make his closing argument the
obvious one, which would be channeling Ronald Reagan and asking
if you're better off than you were four years ago?
Oh boy, here, I mean, I still trying to figure
out what the thought process was behind that close I
actually I know he just listened to Kamala Harris's closing

(09:11):
argument and then used his closing argument to rebutt it. Basically,
his closing argument was all about Harris not having done
as vice president all of the things that she now
says that she wants to do, while calling Biden and
Harris the worst president and vice president of all time.
He never actually made the case for himself specifically, never

(09:35):
even asked for the vote specifically. It was kind of like, yeah,
these two are the worst ever, and it's kind of
like and so here I am type of thing, don't
know about that, And that takes me to the reaction.
Third takeaway today painful. I wish I hadn't watched it.

(09:58):
It's a quote from my wonder fuy f Ashley. Trump
had a bad night. That was the consensus from a
larger group of conservative friends and family via text messages.
Trump started well when the focus was on the economy.
He had his moments again with a focus on border policy.

(10:19):
Harris largely performed better through all of the other segments.
That is my inference to the debate. Now, it was
given that Harris was going to have a better night
than Biden did it in this debate, and simply stringing
together some sentences would have achieved that. So she obviously
far outperformed Biden. But more than that, she ended up

(10:44):
basically flipping the script here. So to give you an
idea on the overall reaction, CNN they always conduct these
flash polls with accredited pollster SSRs. After the first debate,
Trump was shown as being the victor in the eyes
of those who watched the debate by a sixty seven

(11:06):
to thirty three percent margin, which, by the way, is
also useful in terms of providing a baseline, like if
you wonder how many people have TDS, you know, how
many people are really so intellectually dishonest that under no
circumstance will they say Donald Trump did better at anything.
I mean, because they had a third of people it
basically said a mummy beat Trump in that debate, right,

(11:28):
So that is a baseline for how many people are
just absolutely dishonest intellectually. That said, this time around, in
that same poll, CNN found that by a sixty three
to thirty seven percent margin, viewers of the debate viewed

(11:48):
Harris as out performing Trump. So again, it was sixty
seven thirty three Trump the first time sixty three thirty seven.
The initial reaction for Harris this time