Some allies of former president Donald Trump conceded privately Wednesday that he performed poorly in Tuesday’s debate and were deliberating over whether a rematch would help or hurt, even as Vice President Kamala Harris’s aides were pushing for a second faceoff as another opportunity for her to get out her message in a shortened campaign.
The Harris team believes a second debate could give her another valuable platform to reach voters who are unlikely to attend her rallies or be swayed by her television ads, according to people familiar with its thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. The Harris campaign had been planning for weeks to press for a second debate, the people said, but ultimately concluded it would be best to wait until the first debate was over before pushing for another.
Republicans, meanwhile, were contending Wednesday with a sense that the night did not go well for Trump, even as he insisted publicly that it had been a triumph.
One Trump adviser said the campaign wants a rematch. But another person close to the campaign, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they hoped Trump would not agree to a second debate unless it was hosted by Fox News, reflecting Republican complaints that ABC News had been unfair to their nominee by fact-checking his assertions on several occasions. Still, this person predicted that Trump would accept another debate in the end.
The maneuvering highlighted the ongoing reverberations from Tuesday’s event, which jolted an already turbulent presidential race. While aides to both candidates said they did not think it had fundamentally changed the dynamics of the contest, each was looking for ways to seize momentum with just weeks remaining in a campaign that is essentially tied.
Some Harris advisers have long been concerned that she faced an uphill challenge of reaching critical voters given the historically brief campaign. “We want as many opportunities to talk about her as we can, given that a lot of our voters are still just learning about her and we have the most truncated election calendar in history,” said one person involved in the process, granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
Inside Trump’s campaign, the former president’s associates were working to shape an argument that he had won. They sought to focus on Harris’s sometimes vague answers in the debate — particularly on the rocky U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 — and less about his sometimes angry demeanor.
“It’s a little bit surprising that instead of talking about her vision and record for America, she attacked Donald Trump,” said Michael Whatley, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Absolutely, they want to make it about Trump. They don’t want to make it about her failed record.”
In a sign of how the candidates were processing the aftermath of the debate, Harris largely stayed quiet as she marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, while Trump —who also attended 9/11 memorial observances — aired his grievances about the moderators and suggested Harris wanted a do-over only because she had performed so poorly.
“In the World of Boxing or [Ultimate Fighting], when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, ‘I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!’” Trump wrote Wednesday afternoon on his Truth Social platform. “Well, it’s no different with a Debate. She was beaten badly last night. Every Poll has us WINNING, in one case, 92-8, so why would I do a Rematch?”
But polls largely show Trump lost the debate. Harris’s aides spent Wednesday celebrating what they viewed as her takedown of the former president onstage — as well as the endorsement of pop star Taylor Swift that came immediately afterward — although some conceded that she had more work to do in the days ahead to make an affirmative case for her candidacy.
While some of Harris’s lines goading Trump on Tuesday night were rehearsed, she improvised several key moments, according to one campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters. Harris’s skeptical expressions, questioning stares, dismissive laughs and spontaneous interjections drew on her record as a prosecutor and a senator accustomed to high-profile interrogations, the official said.
Trump showed up in the spin room after the debate, which he did not do following his successful debate against President Joe Biden in Atlanta. A person who was in the room with Trump campaign aides Tuesday said the “vibes were night-and-day different from Atlanta,” describing the mood as “subdued and quiet.”
As Trump entered the spin room afterward, Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.), a close friend of Harris’s, laughed. Asked why he would feel the need to show up instead of letting surrogates speak for him, Butler said, “That’s what losers do.”
The Trump campaign argued that Harris had been woefully short on policy specifics. It also sent out talking points to allies after Tuesday’s debate, including a section titled, “Kamala’s Lies and Platitudes vs. President Trump’s Plan of Action.”
The fiery night left both campaigns plotting the path forward in a complex and increasingly heated contest. Most voters have long since made up their minds about Trump, while polls suggest many Americans do not have a clear idea of what Harris stands for. That is factoring in to both candidates’ deliberations over a second showdown.
Alex Conant, a GOP strategist, said that Tuesday’s debate was “at best a missed opportunity, potentially much worse” for Trump, pointing specifically to the former president’s false claim that migrants were eating people’s dogs and cats in small-town America. “If he loses the election, people can point to the debate as the key reason why,” Conant said. “He should definitely want to do a second debate. I don’t think he wants the last image in the minds of voters to be him spouting conspiracy theories about pets.”
More than 67 million people watched Tuesday’s debate, according to figures released Wednesday by Nielsen.
After the debate, spokesman Brian Hughes said that Trump was interested in debating again and was open to a rematch hosted by NBC later this month. But by Wednesday morning, Trump was signaling he was against it.
“When you win the debate, I don’t know that I want to do another debate,” Trump told “Fox & Friends.”
Hours later, during an appearance in Shanksville, Pa., Trump expressed openness to a rematch, including on NBC or Fox. Several networks have proposed dates for future debates, giving the candidates multiple options.
Harris’s aides were cheered that she avoided the kind of garbled and wordy responses that had vexed her in previous unscripted settings. Advisers said that reflected her growing confidence as the Democratic party has rallied around her. Still, they cautioned that she remains the “underdog” in the race and predicted that the election will come down to the wire.
Harris’s team has resisted earlier proposals by Trump’s team that a second debate be held on Sept. 25. The Democrats prefer a later date in October, hoping that would make it easier for Harris to use another strong performance to propel her toward Election Day.
The Harris campaign has been in talks with both CNN and NBC about possible dates, though the door has not closed on other networks, said a person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.
Harris’s aides believe that she urgently needs to introduce herself more fully to the public, a sentiment that explains some of her campaign’s nontraditional moves in recent weeks, including a decision to buy ads on taxis in Philadelphia and to pay for a drone light show over the Schuylkill River.
Some of her aides have also begun to discuss the possibility of buying a large prime time bloc on major networks in key states before the election, a tactic employed by Barack Obama in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign, according to two officials familiar with the discussions.
Despite Trump’s insistence that he had won Tuesday night, an instant CNN poll showed Harris winning the debate 63 percent to 37 percent among debate-watchers, while a YouGov poll showed her winning 54-31 among registered voters who watched at least some of the debate.
Privately, people close to Trump conceded that his performance left something to be desired, especially when he was distracted by such issues as the crowd sizes at his rallies. “But he’s going to be himself,” said one of those people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a frank assessment.
Any discussion of future debates will trigger new negotiations over the rules.
The Harris campaign began preparing for Tuesday’s event with the hope that the candidates would directly engage each other, with their microphones on throughout the event. Harris was preparing for those exchanges until it became clear that Trump would not move away from the terms established by the Biden campaign, providing for the mics to be turned off when it was not a candidate’s allotted time to speak.
Harris then shifted her preparation to focus on two-minute answers containing what one person involved called “Easter eggs” designed to rattle Trump. The strategy paid off when Trump became agitated as Harris needled him over such matters as the inheritance he received from his father, the ostensible “exhaustion and boredom” of his rally attendees and his legal problems.
Maeve Reston contributed to this report.