Trump tells C4 News he won debate against Harris, as both sides claim victory

It was a most claustrophobic place for a debate. Six feet apart, with only two moderators and a silent studio crew for company. Tuesday night’s studio in Philadelphia was a world away from the rapturous rallies where Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have spent most of their campaign time.

In a cavernous room half a mile away, a thousand journalists jostled with burly minders, suited press officers and high profile politicians in a vigorous spin cycle, before and after the debate.

The convention at these events is that candidates stay above the fray, presidential. Leaving so-called surrogates to run the gauntlet of the press.

But Donald Trump has never been conventional. And after a heated debate where he talked about migrants eating dogs, Democrats executing babies and repeatedly predicting World War 3, the former president felt he had to enter the Spin Room.

There was pandemonium as journalists, camera crews and photographers rushed to hear what the president had to say – concern etched on the faces of Secret Service agents as lenses, phones, chairs and reporters were knocked flying.

Taken behind a curtain to escape the pursuing pack, he re-emerged shortly afterwards on the temporary set of Fox News, where he was to be interviewed by the conservative host Sean Hannity.

As he was being mic’d up, I caught up with him and asked him if he had won the debate.

“I think we did great,” he replied.

“Did you feel you won?”

“I felt I won by a lot.”

But after ninety minutes of traded barbs, I asked him whether he felt Kamala Harris had got him rattled.

“No, not at all”, he said.

I put it to him that he seemed a bit rattled. And with a dismissive wave of the hand, he turned away.

If ABC and campaign executives thought that Philadelphia would be an evocative venue, surrounded by symbols of freedom like the Liberty Bell, then their choice of the National Constitution Center – a beige building, set far back from the public and surrounded by miles and miles of metal fencing – ensured the setting would quickly be forgotten.

But make no mistake: the cops patrolling the perimeter might have looked bored and the local taxi drivers mildly annoyed, but this debate was always going to be consequential.

Just weeks ago, Joe Biden showed how high the stakes can be for a candidate. Even one with half a century of political experience. A ninety minute horror show for the president fatally undermined American voters’ confidence in him and ended his re-election run.

Surveys before this debate showed repeatedly that undecided voters knew and had made up their minds about Donald Trump, but wanted to learn more from the woman serving as Vice President. In fact, a recent New York Times/Siena poll said 48% felt they needed to know more.

In an historically close polling race, consistently within the margin of error, those undecided voters will decide the election.

What’s not clear, despite her performance and Trump’s many clangers, is whether or not they’ll vote for her.

Rattling Trump

It was clear right from the start of the broadcast that the vice president’s plan was to rattle Trump, from the moment she boldly strode across the stage, arm outstretched, right at him. A power move, if ever there was one.

“Let’s have a good debate”, she said, eyeing the man she’d never before stood face to face with until now.

And the former president got off to a good start, attacking her on the critical issue in which the opinion polls say he has a clear advantage with voters, the economy: “She copied Biden’s plan and it’s like four sentences, like run spot, run. Four sentences that are just, ‘Oh, we’ll try and lower taxes.’ She doesn’t have a plan. Take a look at her plan. She doesn’t have a plan.”

Harris seemed a little nervous in these early stages, but got into her stride during a fierce exchange on the issue that the polls say voters most trust her to fix: America’s running battle over abortion. An issue which could decide November’s election.

Trump attacked Harris’s running mate Tim Walz, saying: “He says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth – it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born – is okay. And that’s not okay with me.”

The moderator intervened: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

Harris made a direct, powerful appeal to the women of America:

“I absolutely support reinstating the protections of Roe v. Wade”, she said.

“Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That is not happening. It’s insulting to the women of America. And understand what has been happening under Donald Trump’s abortion bans. Couples who pray and dream of having a family are being denied IVF treatments.

“Working people, working women who are working one or two jobs who can barely afford child care as it is, have to travel to another state to get on a plane sitting next to strangers, to go and get the healthcare she needs, barely can afford to do it. And what you are putting her through is unconscionable.”

Once on comfortable turf, Harris picked up the pace, needling Donald Trump by saying his rallies left punters leaving early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”

Trump replied furiously: “She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there… 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.”

But surely his advisors were wincing backstage when Trump went off piste with wild allegations about Haitian migrants in Ohio.

In some of the most bizarre exchanges seen in the history of presidential debates, the 45th US president told the audience that migrants were “eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

It prompted laughter from Harris and a fact-check from the debate moderator.

So was any of it enough to win over those crucial – often elusive – undecided voters?

It will take days, even weeks for any shift in public sentiment from this debate to be seen in polling numbers. It’s unlikely there will be panic in the Republican ranks of the type that saw the Democrats eject Biden as their candidate after the last debate. And while Trump ally Lindsey Graham rued a “missed opportunity”, the former president equivocated when asked if he’d like another opportunity to debate Harris. It’s now too late for the parties to change course. They just have to wait, in the knowledge their best chance to win over voters is now in the past.