A Harris-Trump Second Debate? Of Course Not.

A puzzling exchange between the Harris and Trump campaigns over a second Trump-Harris debate hasn't drawn much attention. Yesterday, on a Saturday. the New York Post reported,

Vice President Kamala Harris has accepted CNN’s invitation to debate Donald Trump for a second time ahead of the November election — despite the latter’s insistence that he doesn’t see a “need” to face-off again.

“The American people deserve another opportunity to see Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debate before they cast their ballots,” Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said Saturday.

“It would be unprecedented in modern history for there to just be one general election debate. Debates offer a unique chance for voters to see the candidates side by side and take stock of their competing visions for America.

“Vice President Harris is ready for another opportunity to share a stage with Donald Trump, and she has accepted CNN’s invitation to a debate on October 23.”

Well, for starters, weren't there actually two debates, scheduled when Joe was still in the race? The first was June 27, and we know what happened. Kamala appeared for the second one, in which Joe was originally scheduled to appear, on September 10. The background for that schedule is given in Wikipedia:

On May 15, 2024, the Biden campaign announced that it would not participate in the [Commission on Presidential Debates]-hosted debates and instead invited Trump to participate in two alternative debates to take place in June and September, each hosted in a TV news studio without an audience. Jen O'Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign manager, laid out three reasons for sidelining the CPD, indicating that the debates were not completed until early voting started, that the debates had become "a spectacle" and that the CPD could not "enforce its own rules". . . . Biden and Trump accepted an offer from CNN to hold the first of these debates on June 27 and from ABC to hold the second on September 10.

Trump indicated the same day that he had accepted a Fox News debate to be hosted on October 2, 2024, though the Biden campaign dismissed the prospect of a third debate.

In other words, Jen O'Malley Dillon, at the time the Biden campaign mabager, set the debate terms and schedule on May 15. Following Joe's withdrawal, she continues as Kamala's campaign manager, although the actual organization chart by this point is unclear. And as of May 15, she rejected the idea of a third debate.

Except that by September 21, the same Jen O’Malley Dillon, campaign manager, announced that the American people deserve the same third debate that she rejected on May 15 -- even though the date she proposed, October 23, is well after voting starts, one of her reasons for rejecting the original CPD schedule.

At a Wilmington, NC rally later in the day, Trump rejected the call:

Trump revealed that he would reject CNN’s invitation to face off against Harris. He cited multiple factors, including that she’s losing the election, he’s already done two debates, voting has begun, and CNN won’t be fair.

The last two are particularly critical because perhaps over half the country will have already voted by the time October 23 arrives, and CNN was scratched by their media peers for being too fair to Trump. Thus, there is no upside to a second showdown.

So Jen O'Malley Dillon has done a 180 on one of her reasons for not having an additional debate, that it would be held after voting starts. That says to me that she, at least, wants a do-over for the September 10 debate, even though the conventional wisdom (which I noted that Sean Trende signed off on) was that Kamala "won" it. How could this be?

Well, here's a headline in Rolling Stone: In Springfield, Trump and Vance's Campaign of Racist Terror and Panic Is Working:

It didn't have to be this way - but, former President Trump and his running mate, Ohio's junior senator, gave voice to a baseless, racist lie about the small city's growing Haitian immigrant community stealing and eating pet dogs and cats, and made it a centerpiece of their campaign during the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election.

A TikTok video of Trump chanting "Eat the cats! Eat, eat the cats!" went viral. Ir didn't help that the Sunday after the debate, Trump survived a second assassinationm attempt, and a few days after that, he went on Gutfeld to record ratings and cracked jokes about the episode. I've said already that Gutfeld's poopy-pants routines about Biden probably had more to do with driving him out of the race than the June 27 debate.

But then Kamala had a disastrous appearance at a rally with Oprah, which followed the refusal of the Teamsters to endorse her. But pay no mind! Nate Silver says,

Harris is pretty clearly getting a bounce in national polls. She’s now up by 2.9 points in our polling average, as compared with 2.2 points on the day of the debate (and 2.0 points on the day after the debate, when there wasn’t yet any post-debate polling included in the averages).

Among the most recent polls that conducted some interviewing on Sunday or Monday, Harris has a larger lead: 4.6 points. So it’s possible that Harris is benefiting not just from the debate but also from the favorable news coverage that it’s brought her.

So why would Jen O'Malley Dillon seem to want a do-over on this same debate that has Kamala soaring in "the polls"? Good question. In fact, I have other questions:

• Why did Jen O'Malley Dillon announce that she wanted a third debate on a Saturday morning, when nobody would be paying attention?
• Why did she choose October 23 for the proposed date, when half the country would already be voting, and less than two weeks before November 5, election day, so late that the debate probably wouldn't matter anyhow?

One possible answer to the first question is that Trump's rejection would also come on a Saturday, when nobody would be paying attention. An answer to the second question would be that not even a Hail Mary play of a second debate would help the campaign. Trump clearly sees a second debate as nothing but the same waste of time the first one was, and Jen O'Malley Dillon pretty clearly agrees.

The strategy all along has been the same, whether for Biden or for Harris: the less voters see of them, the better. They didn't want an extra debate in May, and they understand pretty clearly that another debate in October won't help now. All I can think is that Saturday's announcement was some sort of token gesture intended to keep someone happy -- possibly Kamala herself.

So the debate proposal was on its face a feckless token, made for reasons that aren't clear by someone whose position on the org chart isn't clear, either. I don't think this augurs well for the campaign, but this isn't the picture "the polls" are painting. I think this shows you still have to watch for other, more subliminal signs.