Kamala Harris had two goals in Tuesday night’s presidential debate. The first was to convince the small but significant segment of undecided and persuadable voters that she can make their lives better economically. The second was to provoke Donald Trump into saying something sexist, racist, incoherent, crazy-sounding, or all of the above.

On the first one, meh, who knows, check back later. On the second one, mission accomplished. Mission really accomplished. Wow!

Harris took the evening’s first question. Moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis asked whether Americans were better off now than they’d been four years ago, given all the inflation that’s taken place under the Biden administration. Dodging the inflation issue, Harris gave an answer about her economic plans; while somewhat halting, it did get across that she is proposing tax cuts for homebuyers, parents, and small-business owners, and it mentioned Trump’s plan to impose heavy tariffs on imported goods, which would likely cause further inflation if enacted. There was some back-and-forth about that. The Washington Post’s live panel of undecided voters basically called this portion of the debate a draw.

From there on out, things went better for Harris from the perspective of what political consultants probably call “the contrast piece” and what regular people might call “easily tricking Donald Trump into talking nonsense.”

Well, that’s not entirely fair: Sometimes Trump did it entirely to himself. Next the moderators asked Trump about abortion, an issue on which voters widely agree with Harris that the protections of Roe v. Wade should be reinstated. His best strategy would have been to say that he would leave the matter to the states and move on. Instead, he defensively insisted on repeating one of his strangest and most empirically untrue talking points, which is that a majority of the country’s voters and legal scholars “wanted” to see Roe overturned, and that overturning it was a “great service” he’s done for the country.

This, in turn, set up Harris to describe some of the consequences for pregnant women who’ve suffered miscarriages in parking lots or been told to take their rapist’s child to term, and in an effective (and seemingly spontaneous) rhetorical twist, to ask if that’s what they “wanted.” Trump dug a further hole for himself when pressed on whether he’d sign a national abortion ban, telling moderators that his running mate J.D. Vance’s claim that he would veto one was false, but then also refusing to say whether he would or wouldn’t.

The subject then........

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