There is probably only one person in the entire United States who thinks that Donald Trump won the debate against Kamala Harris. And that person is Donald Trump. Whether he really believes it or whether he just said it to "save what can be saved" is not known. The fact is that even Fox News, the American TV network that has always supported the Republican Party and even its most extremist wings, was forced to admit that "In the Trump-Harris duel there was a clear winner”. And that winner, or rather that winner, is Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
What polls and pollsters say
A confirm Harris' triumph then there are the results of the rapid survey conducted by CNN after the end of the debate, according to which 63% of people who watched the TV duel on ABC said the vice president performed better, compared to 37% who thought Trump had won. That 26-point gap is hard to argue with, especially since before the debate, voters were evenly split on which candidate would do better, with 50% saying Harris would dominate and 50% saying Trump would. “The flash poll results represent a shift from the reaction to the presidential debate in June, when voters who followed the Trump vs Biden comparison they said, by 67% to 33%, that Trump had prevailed over his Democratic rival,” he said note again CNN.
A majority of voters who participated in a US TV focus group at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, also said they thought Harris had won. The group consisted of 13 voters who had not yet decided who to vote for before the debate. When CNN's Phil Mattingly asked them who had won, eight of the voters chose Harris. The reporter noted that Erie is “the most volatile county in the swing state” of Pennsylvania.
The statistician NateSilver he wrote on his blog FiveThirtyEight that there is “a strong consensus that Harris won the night.” Silver, who is considered a polling authority, also noted that bitcoin prices have fallen, “which also implies a loss for Trump.”
How Markets Reacted to the Harris-Trump Debate
"I betting markets “They reacted quickly to the debate performance,” says Union Bancaire Privée (UBP) group chief strategist Norman Villamin, explaining that Trump, who had gone from a 45% chance of winning the August election to a 52% pre-debate, has seen his lead shrink to 50-50 on the Polymarket and Real Clear Polling betting markets. That compares with the increase from 51% to 56% that Trump had experienced after his June duel with President Biden.
Sui financial markets, in the Italian night, the yields of the Treasury Americans went down, the dollar has come under pressure and the futures of theS & P 500 they dropped as the debate evolved and Harris' lead increased.
The reaction of stocks after the opening (mixed following the inflation data) of Wall Street is particularly interesting. Investors' opinion is clearly visible in the performance of Trump Media & Technology, the company that controls the social media platform Truth, whose stock is falling 15,5% to an all-time low of $15,74 per share.
In general, Markets are pricing in Harris's victory in the debate: for this reason, for example, the stocks of companies that produce solar energy, such as First Solar (+ 8,9%) and EnphaseEnergy (+3,24%), as the Democratic candidate said she was in favor of “different sources of energy” to reduce the United States’ dependence on oil imports.
On the contrary, stocks related to the cryptocurrency sector are travelling in the red, given that Trump is considered more inclined towards the development of the crypto market compared to the current President Biden and the Democratic Party in general: with the bitcoin down more than 3% below $55, the stock Coinbase marks a 4,4% red, microstrategy loses 4,9%; Marathon Digital 5,8% and Riot Platforms the 7,18%.
How Harris Won the Debate (And Trump Lost It)
Regardless of Trump's claims ("I won"), who was the real winner of the presidential debate is clearly visible from the immediate reactions from those directly involved, with Trump flying into the air a few seconds before the end of the debate spin room without saying a word and the Republicans accusing the moderators of the ABC of having favored Harris, while the latter's supporters are immediately calling for the organization of a second televised debate.
What will it be the effect of the duel We will only know about the "real" polls in a few days, while we will have to wait two months to understand if it will really have an impact on the election results (Hillary Clinton also won her debate against the tycoon). The fact is that Kamala Harris, after a somewhat timid start, succeeded in her intent. She distanced herself from Biden's image and brought the tycoon exactly where she wanted: continually provoking him and putting him in difficulty on his own strengths, leading him to quote fake news spread on social media ("In Springfield, immigrants eat pets", he ended up saying amidst incredulous laughter from his rival) instead of raging on an issue on which the Democrats have always limped. Harris managed to hit Trump's ego by confusing him, when she stated that two dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, "are rooting for him because they can manipulate him" or when she said "Foreign leaders laugh at him. You are a friend of Putin, a dictator who would eat you for breakfast". She finally struck the knockout blow when she indirectly referred to the age difference between the two (“I offer a new generation of leadership”), turning against him the accusations that the tycoon reserved for Biden.
And at the end of the evening Harris also took home the endorsement of singer Taylor Swift who, after the TV debate, published a post on Instagram, saying she will vote for her. The biggest snub? Swift signed herself “Childless Cat Lady,” a reference to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s words, who had called Harris that.
