The Spectator

The first presidential debate between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris took place last night on ABC News. The candidates talked about the economy, immigration, abortion, foreign policy and other major issues facing voters heading into November. We won’t get too much into winners and losers here, as you can head to The Spectator’s home page for all kinds of reactions. Here’s a quick sample:  How Kamala Harris won the debate comfortably, Charles Lipson ABC News is the big loser of the debate, Roger Kimball  The Trump-Harris presidential debate failed the voters, Amber Duke What we will cover is snap reactions from voters and what happens next.

The long-awaited debate between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is kicking off Tuesday night at 9 p.m. ET on ABC News. This is a high-stakes moment, mostly for the Harris campaign: Kamala’s predecessor at the top of the ticket, President Joe Biden, was forced by his own party to drop out of the race after an abysmal performance against Trump in June, and Kamala has only done one unscripted event on camera since launching her own campaign. Unlike that CNN interview with Dana Bash, Kamala will be challenged and will not have her running mate, Tim Walz, sitting next to her for support.

President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to tax charges in a last-minute reversal of his previous not guilty plea. The younger Biden was accused of failing to pay taxes on his lucrative business — often foreign — ventures and accepted guilt on all nine charges. There was no deal with prosecutors; Biden will not receive a reduced fine or sentence for his change of hear, instead explaining that he merely wanted to avoid putting his family through additional scrutiny like that of his Delaware gun trial.  “I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment,” Biden said in a statement. Biden’s lawyers acknowledged that there was enough evidence to convict him in a trial.

The political pundits like to tell us that general election polls don’t matter until after Labor Day. That, they say, is when the average American actually starts paying attention to what is happening in the election and so you can get a better understanding of which way the electorate is leaning. The only problem with that traditional wisdom is that it’s hard to put much stock into polls when so many are returning drastically different results.Take the Morning Consult poll that dropped this morning that shows Harris surging with a lead in six of the seven battleground states. The poll has her up eight points in Wisconsin, four in Pennsylvania and Nevada and three in Michigan. To be frank, no one serious believes these numbers.

Kamala’s first interview as nominee falls flat Vice President Kamala Harris — and CNN — failed to impress in the first sit-down and unscripted interview she has given since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee forty days ago. Harris spoke for just eighteen minutes and opted not to explain how and why her policy positions have changed so drastically in the past four years, instead offering that her “values haven’t changed” and stood by her positive post-debate assessment of President Joe Biden’s cognitive state. Perhaps most confusing was Harris’s insistence that Americans are looking for a “new way forward” and to “bring America into a new decade,” which conveniently left out the fact that she has been in office for at least a third of that decade.