US election: Harris puts Trump on defensive in fiery debate

US presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Donald Trump faced off in an occasionally fiery debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening, with the November election still on a knife-edge.

Separated in opinion polls by the barest of margins, the candidates stayed true to their expected strategies. Democratic candidate Harris attempted to provoke Trump, while suggesting that what she called his divisive rhetoric had no bearing on Americans' real concerns.

"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people," she said, in one of the evening's more memorable lines. "And clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that."

Her Republican counterpart, meanwhile, hammered his favorite issues — inflation and undocumented migrants, even when they were not the subject of the question — and repeated several outlandish, debunked claims, including that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating family pets — a claim that has made the rounds on social media, amplified by Trump's running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance.

"We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and they're coming in, and they're taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions," the former president claimed.

Harris offered optimistic vision of the US

Vice President Harris took several opportunities to bring up what has become her new campaign slogan — "We're not going back" — and did all she could to offer Americans an optimistic vision, in contrast to what she painted as Trump's backward-looking, negative vision of the state of the US.

"In a normal world, there would be hardly any question: Kamala Harris would be the clear winner of this debate," said Ines Pohl, DW's Washington bureau chief. "She presented herself as in charge, confident, well-informed and capable of leading this country into a brighter future. Donald Trump, on the other hand, was put on the defensive by her; he could hardly finish a complete sentence and spewed one lie after another, sometimes so irrational that it's hard to believe."

But for half of the US electorate, this might not matter, concluded Pohl. "The bitter truth is that the United States of 2024 is no longer a place where truth and facts matter."

Candidates clash on economy, abortion 

Nevertheless, Harris was also on the defensive during the debate, with Trump often trying to shift attention to her part in President Joe Biden's record since 2021 and what he termed Biden's failures. According to recent polls, more US voters trust Trump on the economy.

The debate opened with a question directed at Harris that is considered a weakness for the Democratic candidate: "Do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?"

Harris evaded the point slightly, responding: "I was raised as a middle-class kid, and I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America."

Laura Merrifield Wilson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Indianapolis, suggested Harris had a good reason to sidestep the issue. "She has a hard time being able to differentiate herself from Biden in this regard," Wilson told DW. "You can look at some economic measures and say the economy might be doing fine, but for most American families, they are looking at their grocery bills and how they were much lower four years ago. I don't know that she addressed exactly how a Harris presidency would change that."

But Harris was on much firmer ground on abortion — an issue that has come to define this election for many, and on which Trump has often changed his position over the years. On Tuesday night, the Republican candidate took to claiming — wrongly — that some Democrats want to make abortions legal in the ninth month of pregnancy, or even after birth — which would be murder, and which, as the ABC moderators pointed out, remains illegal in every US state.

Harris says she 'will always give Israel the ability to defend itself'

Some 50 minutes in, the debate turned to international affairs — specifically the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Trump avoided the repeated question of whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war, insisting instead that he could resolve the conflict almost immediately after being elected.

He also claimed that neither conflict would have started had he been president in the last three years, and that if Harris were elected, "Israel would not exist within two years from now."

Harris rejected this claim and attempted to give a more nuanced answer, repeating a line she has uttered often over the last year: "Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters." While she condemned the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, she added, "it is also true that far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed," and suggested that under her presidency, the US would continue to work toward a cease-fire and a two-state solution, which has been the official US position for many years.

Nevertheless, she added that the US would continue to supply Israel with weapons, saying she would "always give Israel the ability to defend itself." What she failed to do, according to Wilson of the University of Indianapolis, was make clear how she could balance these aims.

"The benefit Harris has here was that Trump's claim was rather outrageous, so it's pretty easy to dismiss," said Wilson. "But I do think she struggled to explain how she could keep a two-state solution and also be able to support a cease-fire. And that is very tricky."

Harris had a clearer answer on Ukraine, pointing out her own part in helping to form an alliance of nations in support of the country. "The reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up," the vice president said.

Who won the debate?

In the aftermath of the 90-minute confrontation — the first time Harris and Trump have ever met — the consensus among pundits and pollsters appears to be that Harris narrowly won the night. But whether this makes a difference in the election, just under two months away, is less clear.

"I don't know that this debate necessarily changes the course, but we've seen in a lot of polling recently that though Harris had been in the lead within the margin of error, that had been declining slightly — and I suspect that that trend might be stopping after this debate," said Wilson. "I feel that generally she gave a very strong debate performance."

But Wilson also thinks Trump was able to land a few key lines. "In the concluding statement, Donald Trump did a really good job in saying that, if she wanted to make these changes, she could've done it in three-and-a-half years," she said. "But Harris was careful not to tie herself to Biden, not to mention him too much."

The Democrats were given a boost in the immediate aftermath of the debate when pop superstar Taylor Swift declared in an Instagram post that she would be voting for Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. How decisive that could prove remains to be seen.

"Trump's supporters will remain loyal to him, even after this performance," said DW's Ines Pohl. "Harris' supporters may be even more energized after her strong showing. This debate won't propel either candidate over the finish line, but Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris might."

Edited by: Martin Kuebler