Trump, Harris spar over debate as they return to campaign trail

US Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump have traded jabs over their first presidential debate in their return to the campaign trail as the candidates visited two crucial swing states in the November election.

Yet, while Harris is seeking to harness momentum from a strong debate performance and bank support from early voters, Trump sought to regain his footing after an unsteady showing, calling the forum’s moderators “lowlifes” and announcing that he would not take the stage against his Democratic rival again.

“THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Thursday, a decision he discussed at length during a campaign event in Tucson, Arizona.

“Because we’ve done two debates and because they were successful, there will be no third debate,” Trump said citing his forums with President Joe Biden and then Harris. Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump led him to his exit from the Democratic ticket and to Harris replacing him.

Trump at his event relitigated the debate with Harris on Tuesday night, insisting he had won, even though a CNN flash poll showed viewers believed the vice president had a better performance, and as her odds of winning the election rose in betting markets during the event.

The Republican presidential nominee assailed the debate’s moderators for fact-checking on air his false claims, which included alleging that immigrants in an Ohio town were eating household pets and that some states allowed babies to be killed after delivery.

“The two anchors, David Muir and Linsey Davis, sat there and only corrected me on things where I was right but didn’t correct Kamala,” Trump said. “The public was not fooled. They saw right through it. Kamala’s lies, an unprecedented partisan interference of two lowlife anchors, they’re lowlifes, for them to do what they did,” he added.

Trump went on to repeat his claims about immigrants eating pets in Springfield. “The migrants are walking off with the town’s geese,” he said, adding they were “even walking off with their pets”.

Trump’s event on Thursday kicked off a fevered stretch of campaigning, including a press conference, rallies and high-dollar fundraisers across Arizona, Nevada and California that have taken on new significance after the debate, which even some of his top supporters acknowledge could have gone better.

While his allies insist the debate is unlikely to be a make-or-break moment as was his exchange with Biden in June, which effectively ended the president’s half-century political career, the pressure is back on Republicans to blunt Harris’ momentum.

Harris, by contrast, intends to capitalise on her showing, looking to solidify support among swing-state voters, who are considering her candidacy anew after her promising debate performance.

She kicked off her own post-debate blitz with a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she said the candidates “owe it to the voters to have another debate”.

Her top aides began calling for a second debate before the candidates had even left the stage in Philadelphia.

She hit Trump over his debate answers on abortion and healthcare, two issues on which Democrats are eager to court suburban women and independents.

During the debate, she pressed Trump on his plan for replacing Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is known. He stopped short of an explicit bid to kill the program as he has previously vowed, saying his team was looking at alternatives and had the “concepts of a plan”, a phrase that Harris ridiculed.

“He said ‘concepts of a plan’,” she said. “Concepts. Concepts. No actual plan, concepts.”

And she pointed out that Trump declined to say if he would veto a bill imposing a national ban on abortion. In the debate, Trump said that, while he was not in favour of abortion, the issue was now up to the states.

Harris’ team said it was shifting into a new, more assertive phase on the campaign trail. After limiting her interactions with the press – and facing criticism from Republicans and members of the media – she will begin sitting for more interviews, including some with local outlets in battleground states and with the National Association of Black Journalists next week.

Former president Barack Obama will also appear at a major fundraiser for Harris in Los Angeles on September 20, according to a person familiar with the schedule, which will help bolster her campaign coffers and fund get-out-the-vote efforts.

Tuesday night’s debate had the air of a missed opportunity for Trump, who has an Electoral College advantage and is favoured to prevail if the race remains tight. Polls have found Trump and Harris generally running neck-and-neck in surveys of the seven swing states expected to decide the election.

Harris is riding high after the debate – and an endorsement from pop star Taylor Swift – seeking to translate those boosts into votes.

Harris, her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, and their spouses are travelling to the battleground states over four days, according to the campaign, which has pegged it as the “New Way Forward Tour”, seeking to persuade voters who desire change that Harris is their candidate. That could be a challenging message for a Democrat whose agenda is largely aligned with Biden’s, something Trump regularly points out.

Harris’ rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Friday will occur three days before that battleground becomes the first in the nation to start early voting, with Virginia, South Dakota and Vermont following next week.

Bloomberg

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