The US presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was pretty sharp. Elbowed ninety minutes of television. Harris put Trump on the defensive though on abortion rights, foreign policy, and the January sixth insurrection, but they also sparred on the economy and on immigration. Joining us now to discuss is Scarlett maguire, who is the polls director at Jail Partners and focused on the US scarlet good morning and
thank you for being with us? Does this debate, to your mind leave the Democrats in a better position polling wise? How did Harris come across? See she is in some ways that the lesser known debter.
Perhaps I think we'll have to wait a little bit to see how this really embeds itself in the polls. But my instinct having watched the debate is that Harris will be left in a slightly stronger position than Trump off the back of it in what is a very
close race. I think, even though American voters are very keen to see her set out a policy platform which we did not get last night, I think the way in which she handled herself and which she was able to fraud and provoke Trump into not sticking to message meant that she edged a win last night, and I think will be left in a better standing with the American public as a result.
When it comes to the hot button issues though for voters, did the candidates manage to distinguish themselves in terms of how they position themselves on things like abortion rights, which we know is a key issue that the Kamala Harris campaign are keen to distinguish themselves on.
I think, yes, the abortion rights. The Democrats want to put abortion firmly on the ballot in November. In some states it literally will be, but in terms of the presidential race, they want to make sure that is front of voters minds as they are confident that this is a clear win for them. I think Harris did win that issue last night, as it were, but again that's
not a surprise. I thought what was more striking was that I didn't feel that Donald Trump was able to land clear blows on the issues that we know are the biggest priorities for the American public, which are the border and the economy, and these are both issues that Trump, at least up until last night, had leads on Harris on big leads over Biden, and still leads on Harris on the economy and the border, and he really leaned last night to deliver a very very clear, triumphant win
on those issues, and I think he failed to do that.
Okay, that's interesting. I mean on the economy, though there was much talk around inflation, Trump saying that there had been no inflation during his administration, and that's not quite true, that there was low inflation during his administration. They also talk quite a bit on tax policy, on tariff policy, and so you don't feel that Trump managed to extract wins on those core topics.
I think what Donald Trump needed to do was to pin Kamala Harris down to Biden's record on the economy and to specifically on inflation, by which I mean cost of living, because that is how voters in America anyway, and I think voters here to think about the think about the economy and inflation specifically. They do not actually watch the inflation figure and if it's coming down, say okay,
it's fine, I approve of this. What they actually noticed is what's happening to their own household finances and whether they still feel under pressure, and crucially, whether they felt under more pressure than they were four years ago. And what Trump I think failed to do was very to tie Harris to what most American voters see to be a failed record on the economy for the ticket that she was part of for the last administration, the administration that's still going now. I think tariffs, it was an
interesting conversation. It's a very interesting debate, different debate in America than it is in the UK on the conversation of tariff's but it's not as important as that central question of inflation, which should be a very big weakness of Kamala Harris. And again I think Trump was unable to exploit that.
Did of course, we know that the small number of swing states is where this election is going to be decided. Did you have the impression that this debate was focused at targeting those voters in those states on issues that are particularly important in places like Pennsylvania.
Yeah, so Pennsylvania is the one everyone's really really watching. It's obviously other states as well, So the sort of seven to look Ouva, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona,
and Georgia. I think though it's not so much you do see actually occasionally lyned so in Kamala Harris's CNN interview, for example, that there seemed to be a sense that when she was really talking about those reductions the diabetes payments, for example, that she might be targeting a specific amount
of diabetes users in one of those states. However, last night, I don't think that was the case so much, actually, because actually what those seven swing states have in common with the rest of the America again is this concern
about economy and the border. There are women's rights and abortion issues there as well, but those two are the dominant ones, so it's not so much of their states specific although there is evidence that swing voters in those swing states do feel under more economic pressure than other voters, so it might be that they care even more about
the economy. But generally speaking, those concerns actually fly across the board, and I didn't get a particular sense last night that they were squarely focusing on, say, fifty thousand voters in Pennsylvania.
The US election, of course, usually important globally in terms of the messages getting out there. I mean, just looking at the newspaper headlines, for example, Politico Harris gets under Trump's skin over and over the FT's headline Harris needles Trump in firey presidential debate in the Telegraph in the UK has a different story, Donald Trump attacks Kamala Harris over policy U turns in debate. Those are the newspaper takes. But actually it's social media and memes that perhaps are
going to be even more important in this election. We've certainly seen it in terms of fundraising that it's the social media push. As a polster, what is your impression of that social media drive and how the debate is going to be chopped up and sliced and pushed out there on social media.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really good point about the sort of decline in how much what the press says in in this election will matter. I think in America it's actually even more. That's even more the case, but also has been for a while because their media system is pretty much entirely bifurcated along along political line.
So you'll get sort of Republican television stations and newspapers and then the Democrat equivalent, and actually most people, even sort of ordinary people or swing voters, will get their news from either one side or the other. So actually, the fact that newspapers or television stations say that would always endorse Trumps, be writing positive things about him after a debate like this or vice versa, doesn't actually change things that much, and that's been the case in America
for a while. But on the specific question of social media clips, yeah, I mean we've seen the impact of
something going viral and what impact that can have. I would always sound a little caution though, because I think when we are very online and very engaged online and very over engaged, I would say politically, with us having this conversation here and probably people listening to the radio station, I think we can forget that actually a lot of voters, and again the voters that will decide this election, are not They are not overly politically engaged, and actually a
lot of them don't even tend to be that online. And so I think we've learned some lessons before, say even the twenty sixteen election or Brexit, about overinterpreting what seems to be very clear online when it comes to an election result with the general public,