Republicans fret Trump debate performance could haunt him at polls in November

Donald Trump’s erratic debate performance on Tuesday night torpedoed his best chance to tarnish Kamala Harris’ image with swing voters, some Republicans believe, with GOP strategists and party leaders calling their 2024 presidential nominee's effort a “missed opportunity” that could come back to haunt him in November.

The ABC News-hosted debate was a critical moment for both presidential campaigns, as Democratic nominee Harris sought to better introduce herself to voters after a whirlwind two-month campaign and prove she could handle a spotlight unlike anything she's ever experienced before. For his part, Trump entered the first and perhaps only showdown with the incumbent 59-year-old vice president looking to blunt her early momentum and tie her to voters’ sour feelings about how the Biden administration has addressed issues including the economy and immigration.

But Republicans who spoke with USA TODAY in the minutes and hours immediately following the debate say that Trump struggled to drive that message home, while Harris constantly put the 78-year-old former president on the defensive over everything from his rally crowds to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Trump repeatedly went off on tangents that diverted him from his core complaints against Harris and left some in the GOP believing he's the one who failed on the biggest stage.

“It was a big missed opportunity in not defining Harris,” said Mike DuHaime, a GOP consultant and former political director for the Republican National Committee, adding: “All the pressure was on Harris to prove she was up for the job… Harris succeeded, partly because Trump was so ineffective.”

Trump may not get another chance as good as the one he had Tuesday night. No additional presidential debates are scheduled, and the 2024 GOP nominee has indicated he might not debate again.

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Obama and Bush lost debates but won the White House

The importance of any single debate can be hard to pinpoint.

Trump knocked President Joe Biden out of the race after their June debate exposed the 81-year-old incumbent's age and lack of coherence. Previously, debate losses haven’t been fatal for candidates. Trump struggled against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 debates but still won the White House, and former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush also prevailed in their campaigns after debate missteps. Yet there may be no bigger events in a campaign than when the presidential candidates square off in person and voters get the chance to measure them against each other.

“Debates are the most important moments in presidential politics,” said GOP consultant Alex Conant, who worked on Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign. “Very little else can change the direction of a race. Not only did (Trump) miss his opportunity, she seized hers.”

GOP strategist Karl Rove, who guided Bush’s winning White House campaigns in 2000 and 2004, was blunt in assessing Trump’s poor performance.

"Will this debate have an effect? Yes, though perhaps not as much as Team Harris hopes or as much as Team Trump might fear," Rove wrote on Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal. "But there’s no putting lipstick on this pig. Mr. Trump was crushed by a woman he previously dismissed as “dumb as a rock.” Which raises the question: What does that make him?

Asked about criticism from some Republicans of their nominee's debate performance, the Trump campaign pointed to a statement released Tuesday by campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles shortly after the contest ended that declares: “President Trump delivered a masterful debate performance tonight, prosecuting Kamala Harris’ abysmal record of failure.”

Trump similarily claimed in a Fox News interview on Wednesday that he won the debate against Harris, even as he complained about the moderators, sentiments that were echoed by many of his supporters. Trump allies say they believe he still has a strong argument to make against Harris and that the Republican does have the upper hand on key policy issues.

Ralph Reed, a Trump supporter and the founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, said the former president’s campaign will continue to push a message that Harris has failed on the economy and immigration. “Those issues are going to weigh her down and I’m more concerned about that over the long term than the debate sort of score card,” Reed said.

Asked how he views the debate score card, Reed criticized the moderators and said the debate was “a very unfair format.”

“Given the fact that the deck was stacked against him and the refs were trying to throw the game, I thought he held his own,” Reed added.

Trump allies urge 'calm'

Some Trump supporters conceded that Harris' had a good debate strategy.

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said Harris’ approach of getting under the former president’s skin proved to be effective, and that more debates would be beneficial at drawing out the vice president’s role in the Biden administration.

What advice would he give Trump for those future public clashes?

“Just be calm,” Donalds told USA TODAY during a spin-room interview after the debate in Philadelphia. “She's attacking you because she's behind and she's attacking you because she has no concrete policy to fix the issues facing the American people. If she did, she would say it.”

The Florida lawmaker has emerged as one of Trump’s more aggressive surrogates on the campaign trail after House Republicans briefly considered him as a speaker candidate in 2023. He was on the list of Trump's potential vice presidential running mates and on Thursday is scheduled to join Kash Patel, a former senior Pentagon official from the Trump administration, at a policy-focused campaign event in Bermuda Run, North Carolina.

In the interview, Donalds said Trump has shown the ability to deliver a sharpened message in the past and that he can do it again.

“I think there were times when he got frustrated, but you would get frustrated if somebody lied about you, lied about your record, lied about what you said, lied about how you made your money and lied about how you got your start,” Donalds said, adding: “What we learned (Tuesday) is Kamala Harris is pretty good at needling people."

Other Republicans who floated around the spin room delivered a similar autopsy of the 90-minute debate. From their perspective, Harris didn’t make a compelling argument about how she could improve American’s lives as much as she “rattled” Trump in front of a national audience.

“The idea that the nation is going to change direction under her, I felt like she wasn’t convincing… It just seemed to be happy talk,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

Graham emphasized how he was pleased with Trump’s closing statement. “I would have hit that harder, earlier,” added the senator who in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries unsuccessfully ran against Trump.

'It's certainly a missed opportunity'

ABC News debate moderators fact checked Trump’s statements on immigration, abortion and crime in real time. Some Republicans argued they didn’t do enough to fact check Harris. Vermont GOP Chair Paul Dame, who serves as a member of the Republican National Committee, questioned whether the moderators were fair but said Trump’s performance was still abysmal, calling it his “worst debate ever.”

Dame said in an interview that Trump got bogged down and distracted by “a hundred foolish things.”

“Anything from crowd size to other things that seemed like non sequiturs,” Dame added. “Trump knows what his issues are. It’s the economy, public safety and I thought he got pretty far off topic from those things.”

Trump acted like he was still speaking to his rally crowds of diehard supporters instead of the broader audience that was tuning in for the debate, Dame said, arguing the former president’s failure to adjust his rhetoric likely cost him a chance to win over swing voters.

“It’s certainly a missed opportunity, it’s a swinging strike,” Dame said. “He had an opportunity to at least demonstrate to people in the middle that he’s the candidate who will bring back a sense of order, and he didn’t do that. In fact, I think Harris succeeded in that better, at least in terms of her presentation.”

Now Trump has just two months to course correct and try to assemble a broad enough coalition to win him a second non-consecutive term in the White House.

David Jolly, a former Florida Republican congressman turned independent, said Trump damaged himself with the debate but expects the race to remain tight and believes Trump has time to recover. The debate was nowhere near the knockout it was for Biden, Jolly said.

“Not even close,” he said. “Last night’s debate is not going to decide this election.”

Jolly, an MSNBC commentator, said he believes Trump will double down on “negative partisanship” in an attempt to vilify Harris and make her unpalatable to swing voters.

That worked in 2016 against Clinton, but not against Biden in 2020 and Jolly said he doesn’t believe it’s working so far in 2024. Instead, Harris has been effective with her “turn the page” message about moving on from the turmoil of the Trump era.

“Donald Trump has yet to realize that,” Jolly said. “And without realizing that’s his greatest liability, he’s in trouble in November and his team knows it.”

He added: “It was a candidate in trouble we saw last night… without a question.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: GOP frets Trump debate against Harris a 'missed opportunity'