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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

I’m looking at the C-SPAN swag shop. There’s some great stuff here.

Oh, it’s amazing. For Valentine’s Day a couple of years ago, my kids made me a card that suggested I was actually in love not with my wife, but with C-SPAN. I have C-SPAN mugs. I have C-SPAN totes. I have C-SPAN everything. There’s this color-blocked, Warhol-style, C-SPAN sweatshirt. It [BLEEP]: whips. [LAUGHS]

Jamelle may have found his Christmas gift list.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From “New York Times Opinion,” I’m Carlos Lozada.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Ross Douthat.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

All right. So I have to confess, I don’t really have a plan for what we’re going to do in this episode of “Matter of Opinion.” I do have the concept of a plan.

Oh.

Oh.

Ba-dum-bum.

And the concept of a plan, I hear, is just as good as an actual plan.

it’s the same thing.

The first part of that concept is having invited our esteemed colleague and friend of the “MoO,” Jamelle Bouie, to join us today. Welcome back, Jamelle.

Hello, hello. Thank you for having me.

So we’re talking at the end of debate week, part 1 or part 2. I don’t know what it is. The punditocracy consensus, including that of the almighty “New York Times Opinion” scorecard, seems to be that Kamala Harris won this debate rather handily. So I want us to get into how she did that.

But I also hope we can talk about what it actually means to, quote unquote, “win a debate,” particularly in a country that is so split, and how much this debate performance in early - to mid-September will affect what happens when people are actually voting. So that’s the plan or the concept of a plan. Does that sound OK to folks?

Absolutely not. I’m out.

I always suspected that about you, Ross. All right. So first, let’s get into how Harris won. When we remember presidential debates, we often look back on sort of this key moment, a key exchange that helped define the candidates for good or for ill. There was Reagan’s joke about how Mondale lacked age and experience to be president, Mitt Romney’s binders full of women.

So now — with the benefit of a day and a half or so to process this debate — I’m wondering, is there a moment for Harris that stood out for you that you think maybe captures why it is she was able to win this debate?

Jamelle, you get to go first.

Yeah, that’s a good question because I’m not sure I would say that there’s a singular moment. I think the specific approach she took to most of the questions was to do basically this, to answer every question with a bit of biography and then demonstrating some progress on the issue, drawing a contrast with Trump, and then attempting to bait him in one way or another. And the bait was important because when Trump took it, he just ate up time he could have used to execute whatever strategy the campaign had for him.

Yeah. I think it was all about the baiting. And she took a dig at his rallies. And you could just see, it’s this moment where it’s like, can Trump resist taking that bait? And he had a clear opportunity because the next question from the moderator was about immigration, which is, generally, a good issue for him.

And from there, you were sort of off to the races with this answer that encompassed his grievance about his rallies being underestimated — and then went back to immigration with the claims that Haitian immigrants are killing and eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. It was uncut Trump. And I’ve watched many, many Donald Trump debate performances, and he never avoids being himself in these debates. But yeah, that to me was the pivot point where it was like, all right, we’re off to the races here.

So I think the way she generally won was that Trump is an unconventional debater, and everybody freaks out. Because even if he’s not answering your question in the way that a normal candidate would, he looks like he is controlling the discussion or controlling the entire spectacle. And at no point during this debate did he look in control, much less like he was controlling the situation.

I mean, he controlled the time, right? He spoke way more than she did, if you were doing it —

No, no, there’s a difference —

— time of posession, football style.

— between sucking up the time and controlling it. And the way that I know that this really hit home is every one of my extremely Republican family members were so disgusted, they couldn’t even watch. They were just — like, they cut off.

You guys are doing the same thing that happened in the debate. I asked you a question about Harris, and this whole discussion largely has been about Trump, about how Trump reacted to Harris. So I’m going to suggest one moment that spoke to me from what Harris said. And that’s when one of the moderators asks Harris about Trump’s denial of the election results. And she has this line, where she says, Trump was fired by 81 million people — looking back on the 2020 election. So, of course, that was sort of a play off the “you’re fired” catchphrase.

But what I liked about it is that she turned that into a bigger critique of Donald Trump. In the third Clinton-Trump debate, when Trump says that he wouldn’t necessarily respect the outcome of the election, Clinton said what you would imagine her to say — this is horrifying. He’s denigrating our democracy. Harris made the same point about — we have to respect the will of the people. But she turned it into a broader critique of Trump. She said, look, he lacks not just the temperament to be president, but the ability to recognize facts. He seems confused by facts.

And so she turned that moment not just into the familiar debate about Trump being anti-democratic — as important as that is — but into a bigger debate about just his lacking the mental acuity to be president of the United States. And I thought that that was smart. But you all want to talk about Trump, so great. Did Trump have any moment that we felt like —

No, no, we — let’s — wait. We can talk — no. Carlos, we can talk more about Harris. The method by which she won the debate did involve letting Trump talk a lot. But I think, generally, what you would say — and this is not a moment, but it is a reality — is that there weren’t any “Veep” moments for Harris, right?

You mean, like, the word salad kind of moments?

The word salad kind of things, the thing where she’s like, as to regards the twirling towards freedom, we must enter the 21st century — that kind of thing. No, she was very fluent. She was prosecutorial but with a light touch. I’m a pretty big Harris skeptic. And she certainly exceeded my expectations, in terms of not being the “Veep” version of herself. And that’s a good thing for her and her campaign.

So Trump attempted to tie Harris to Joe Biden in very blunt terms. He frequently referred to Biden as your boss and at one point said, remember, she is Biden. And that led to her saying, well, you may have noticed I’m not Joe Biden. How important is it for Trump to tie Harris to Biden? And how important is it for Harris to keep her distance from her, in fact, boss?

Well, extremely important because this is a change election. And one of the things that has frustrated Trump so is he was all ready to just blame everything that was wrong in the country on Biden. And he has many times said, well, if I were in charge, nothing bad would have ever happened. So that’s more complicated with Kamala. And what you see him trying to do is just ask over and over again, well, you’ve been there for 3 and 1/2 years. Why haven’t you fix it already?

Now, I know this is hard for him. She’s not the president. She’s the vice president. And the vice president doesn’t make policy or guide the direction of the government. But it is an important attempt by him to say that she is the same thing as Biden, and he’s fairly desperate to do it.

Well, and she also has not distanced herself in any substantial or meaningful way from the Joe Biden administration. So, yes, if her formal agenda is similar to the formal Biden agenda, then, Why haven’t you done it? is, I think, a reasonable distillation of the question that —

No, no.

— you would ask.

That question would be, why hasn’t —

I think this is obviously —

— Biden done it?

I just think you’re letting Harris off the hook in this sort of silly way. That’s all. You’re like, oh, well —

I’m letting Harris off the hook because he’s trying to suggest that, as vice president, she should —

It’s like you’re a debate moderator here. That’s all I’m saying. It’s like —

Oh my god. Did you just suggest —

— you’re an ABC debate moderator.

— the debate was rigged, Ross, in Kamala’s favor?

You know it’s all rigged.

Aw, poor Trump.

It’s — I’m just —

I will just chime in to add that I don’t think Harris has made a concerted effort to distance herself from the positions of the Biden administration, and I’m not actually sure that she should. I think she should talk about the Inflation Reduction Act. I think she should talk about the CHIPS Act. I think she should talk about the attempt to forgive school loans. I think these are things that the public doesn’t necessarily know about, and it’s worth trying to tout them.

I think the place where Harris is trying to present herself as a candidate of change is — and she made this point during the debate — is generationally. I think this is the rhetorical posture that she’s taking, not necessarily that she represents a policy departure from Biden. And I’ll say — this is my own view — this election has had a lot of talk about policy specificity in a way that I find very strange, having covered plenty of presidential elections, where neither voters nor reporters really cared all that much.

So I think that the policy specificity thing is sort of like a fig leaf or red herring for something else that people are concerned about. But in any case, I think Harris is focused less on trying to distance herself from Biden on policy and saying, listen, don’t you want to go forward with someone who doesn’t represent the past, especially someone who represents — in Trump’s case — a past that you disliked enough to knock him out of office already?

What’s interesting about that is that it’s the most benign kind of distance she can create between herself and Joe Biden. It’s nothing about what Joe did. It’s just that he’s older, and I’m not. But the irony of this distance-from-Biden thing is that she’s basically running the Biden campaign strategy. When the Biden campaign wanted to move the debate forward — one of the most fateful decisions in recent American political history — it was because they thought they would benefit from emphasizing the contrast between, like, here’s crazy Trump and sober Joe. And that backfired massively because of Biden’s age and his condition.

But Harris is doing the same thing. Even though she’s the VP in the incumbent administration, she’s making the campaign entirely about Trump. That’s what Biden wanted to do. She’s just much better at it.

But Biden was very invested in making the Trumpian threat to democracy central because he felt like that had worked for him in 2020 and had saved a bunch of Democratic Senate seats in 2022. And with Harris, that theme is still there. It showed up in the debate.

But it’s more of a subtheme in — and I agree with Jamelle here — this sort of larger, like, Trump is weird and freaky and reactionary, and JD Vance is weird and freaky and reactionary. And we are the new generation of the American future that you voters want. And by the way, Trump doesn’t respect democracy, and he’ll be dangerous in office.

But where you’re laying the emphasis has changed. And Biden couldn’t do a generational change argument because, obviously, he was ancient and decrepit. So that is, I think, a meaningful shift and one — I think it has been helpful to the Democrats.

I am very, very skeptical, though, that Harris’s debate victory will meaningfully shift the campaign. I’m just skeptical that that is enough to get over the substantive problem the Democrats have, which, to Jamelle’s point, is not a problem about specific, nitty-gritty policy, but it is a problem of issue areas. Voters are dissatisfied with how the economy has performed because of inflation. They’re dissatisfied with immigration policy. And they’re dissatisfied with the fact that the international landscape is pretty dark and grim right now.

And those are problems that I’m just not sure you finesse by saying, Trump is old and weird and I’m a new generation. I think there’s just limits to what Harris achieved, but we’ll see.

I think on immigration and the border, I actually think the Harris answer is a good one, emphasizing this piece of legislation that Trump did literally kill. And it emphasizes the larger point she’s making about Trump, which is that this is just a guy who’s not actually interested in solving problems. So I think that’s an effective answer. I think where Harris still has trouble is on the economy and on inflation.

And the truth of the matter — that inflation was a global problem, that the Federal Reserve and the administration have successfully gotten it down to normal levels — doesn’t deal with the visceral thing that there are these price changes. Things are more expensive — the fact that wages have gone up above and beyond inflation — again, doesn’t really resonate with people who see the price of something. So I do think she needs a better answer on that.

And although people interested in policy don’t like it, the price gouging — I’m going to deal with price gougers — that’s probably her best approach, in terms of just trying to persuade voters that she has a solution. Because the fact of the matter is that people, when they think about a problem, they imagine a villain. It’s hard to convince people that a problem is a function of larger structural forces. And so Harris saying, well, it’s an evil corporation who’s raising the price of groceries is probably her best option when it comes to trying to deal with that particular issue problem.

Which is kind of the flip side of Trump blaming everything on immigrants.

Right, right, right.

Jamelle, you expressed understandable perplexity at the popularity of policy specificity. Suddenly, Americans are all wonks and want to know exactly what she thinks about X, Y, or Z. I think part of that question is a proxy for just a sort of gut-check trust level that voters might feel they need with Kamala Harris. She didn’t go through the trial by fire of a primary campaign in 2024 that would have required her to be clearer on a set of issues and contrast them with other approaches within the party. That was one of the questions in the debate. I think it was Linsey Davis who laid out, when you ran for president last time, you said this on a series of issues — whether fracking or anything else — and now you have a very different position. Where did that come from? And all she could say was this thing about, like, my values haven’t changed. And it’s very generic and amorphous. And I think that makes people wonder a little bit, well, how much can we trust what she is saying today?

And lacking the primary campaign, we didn’t get a lot of clarity on that this time around. But Ross raised the question of to what extent this debate is going to mean much for the campaign going forward. And I want us to move to that. We’ll take a quick break here. And when we’re back, we’ll look at what this debate did or did not reveal about what Trump and Harris and their campaigns are going to do in the next seven weeks we have left.

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So on a week like this, it feels like the debate is everything, right? But in the end, it is only one moment in a longer campaign. Is there anything about what you saw this week in the debate, in its aftermath, that you think is revealing about what these two campaigns are trying to do or will need to do moving forward?

Well, Harris is still going to have to do a little bit of introducing herself and making people comfortable with her. I do think that your........

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