Will a Sorkin Debate Moment Matter?

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump performed like they were reading a West Wing script. Will that have any effect?

Photo by René DeAnda on Unsplash

Well, the jury is in, and it matches my initial thoughts: all of the snap polls and the straight media coverage and the pundits (even the Republicans) concluded that Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump and it wasn’t close. Trump will continue to loudly insist that he won, but the fact that he chose to appear in the spin room immediately after the debate is more revealing. Candidates do not appear in the spin room unless they know they have soiled the bed. Last night CBS News’ John Dickerson told Stephen Colbert that debates rarely move the needle in presidential politics — and then acknowledged that this debate seemed to be an exception.

Upon further reflection, what strikes me is just how much the debate played out like an Aaron Sorkin script.

Wait, don’t click away, I can explain!

Here is how Sorkin thinks an ideal presidential debate would go for a Democrat:

The actual debate between Harris and Trump did not play out exactly like this — both Harris and Trump were somewhat less polished than their fictional doppelgangers. Still, it was close — Harris’ answers on reproductive freedoms and foreign policy were her most impassioned and eloquent moments.

Ironically, one of Sorkin’s weaknesses as a screenwriter is his tendency to set up dramatic conflicts between a super-smart protagonist and an antagonist who is always one beat too slow to be interesting. Unfortunately for Republicans, their presidents in this century have epitomized that stereotype. And this debate played out in a similar manner. Harris kept baiting Trump — and the former president kept taking the bait.

In his scripts, Sorkin moments designed to be game-changers, moments of rhetorical jousting that are so definitive that the political center of gravity shifts. Will that be true in real life?

I remember the one time I had a Sorkin moment. I was attending an all-day multi-disciplinary seminar, and there was one guy in the room who Just. Would. Not. Shut. Up. He dominated the conversation in an unproductive manner. At one point, however, he started monologuing about an obscure tract that ostensibly explained everything. No one else in the room had read this work, except for the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World. And the moment he started talking about it was the moment I realized he had badly misinterpreted the text. I intervened, and in a two-minute monologue managed to make it pretty clear to everyone in the room that he was an intellectual lightweight.

Did that feel good in the moment? You betcha! But I also remembered that at the end of the conference, I had not necessarily persuaded a lot of other attendees about my other arguments. Many folks came to that room with pre-existing beliefs, and many of those beliefs were in synch with the lightweight. Even though I had won the rhetorical battle, I left that day unconvinced I had won the wider war of ideas.

Could the same thing happen to Harris? The New York Times had a story on how undecided voters reacted to the debate that hints at this direction:

For weeks, undecided voters have been asking for more substance.

So it was perhaps no accident that Vice President Kamala Harris’s first words during the presidential debate on Tuesday were, “I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan.”

Some Americans might need more convincing.

Bob and Sharon Reed, both 77-year-old retired teachers who live on a farm in central Pennsylvania, had high hopes for the debate between Ms. Harris and former President Donald Trump. They thought that they would come away with a candidate to support in November.

But, Ms. Reed said, “It was all disappointing.”

The couple ended the night wondering how the costly programs each candidate supported — Mr. Trump’s tariffs and Ms. Harris’s aid to young families and small businesses — would help a couple like them, living on a fixed income that has not kept pace with inflation. They said they didn’t hear detailed answers on immigration or foreign policy, either.

The rest of the story will be, how to put this, a depressing read for anyone who has already made up their mind. But it does hint at the possible limit to the benefits of winning a debate, limits that the Trump campaign is trying to sell to journalists. Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman similarly reported that, “Trump’s co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita told people that the trajectory of the race didn’t change, according to a former campaign staffer. On Truth Social, Trump posted a flurry of rapid-response polls that showed him overperforming with undecided voters.”

Still, if memory serves, after Biden’s disastrous June performance the poll numbers didn’t move for a little while. The numbers started to move after a few more negative news cycles for Biden. Early indications are that Trump will experience something similar. His staff is already bemoaning his performance to the press. Also, he lost Taylor Swift’s vote, and I hear she’s pretty popular! So we will see over the next week or so.

Perhaps, however, the part of the debate that was most important wasn’t the Sorkin moments — it was that the entire debate made Harris seem even more presidential. As the newcomer nominee, and as the politician whose job it was to stand in Joe Biden’s shadow, there were valid reasons to wonder if Harris could handle the big stage. Her Tuesday night debate performance cleared that bar and then some.

Indeed, it was the foreign policy reporters who noticed this. Slate’s Fred Kaplan wrote:

What we were seeing was the flip side of how easily foreign heads of state, especially tyrants, manipulate Trump to their favor. All they have to do is call him “Sir” (as he often recites them doing in stories, some possibly true, most clearly fictitious), and he will eat poison right out of their hands….

The point is that in Trump’s mind, everything is about—and only about—Trump. When Harris doubts or ridicules his stature, his wealth, the size of his crowds, or whatever, he feels compelled to fight back and restore his eminent centrality at once. When the likes of Putin, Kim, Orbán, and the chief Islamist terrorist in Afghanistan bow down before him in even the most blatantly feigned respect, he basks in the glory—and (this is the dangerous part) reciprocates the gesture….

After showing how deeply she could rattle him with the slightest personal insult, Harris turned the tables and spelled out how deeply others can win him over with the slightest compliment. “It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again,” she said, “because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.”….

Harris said all this while looking straight at Trump. Many people who have dealt with Trump know this about his vulnerability to flattery, his envy of strongmen, his puzzlingly desperate need for approval and praise. Some of his aides have recounted this compulsion in books they’ve written after leaving office. But it’s quite possible that Harris is the first person ever to say these things straight to his face.

Politico’s Nahal Toosi arrived at a slightly different but complimentary conclusion:

If one of Donald Trump’s goals during Tuesday’s debate was to show that Kamala Harris would be a weak world leader, he failed.

She managed, after all, to hold her own against him while navigating topics unusually tricky for a Biden administration official, such as the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the politically dicey Israel-Hamas war. On the second, Harris repeatedly stressed the need for a two-state solution, for instance — showing her support for Palestinians while also insisting she’ll defend Israel.

Foreign officials watching the Philadelphia faceoff weren’t expecting — and didn’t get — many policy specifics from either candidate. But many of those I spoke to said they wanted to see if Harris could stand up to a man who can be a bully, especially toward women, and rattle his political opponents….

By the time the debate was over, several foreign officials from both U.S. allies and more neutral countries told me they felt more confident that Harris could handle the tricky personalities she’d encounter while in the world’s most powerful job.

“Composed, authoritative, and presidential,” one European diplomat raved….

Her ability to manage Trump offered assurance that she could navigate tough personal relationships. Given that international relations often come down to the nature of personal relations, this matters.

Eventually the polls and eventually the vote tallies will tell us whether the debate really mattered and why. But for now, we can all speculate whether it will matter because Harris was sharper, whether Harris was better — or whether it will matter at all.