OPINION:
The unavoidable and sometimes unpleasant reality of this presidential campaign is that it can be reduced to those voters who support former President Donald Trump and those who are voting against Mr. Trump. Or, if you prefer shorthand, Trump yes or Trump no.
The relative unimportance of the other candidate was made clear when the Democrats changed candidates midstream, and the alteration did not materially affect the campaign’s likely trajectory or terminal point.
The change in candidates did, however, affect the recent debate. Voters unable to see their way clear to vote for Mr. Trump needed some reassurance that Vice President Kamala Harris was not the giggling, unbright schoolgirl she sometimes appears to be; she was a credible alternative for the presidency.
She passed that test with a solid if unspectacular performance.
As for Mr. Trump, he needed to avoid any particularly egregious mistakes, especially anything that seemed like a personal insult directed at his opponent. If possible, the Trump campaign was also hoping that he would spend the debate informing voters about the vice president’s prior or current positions on gun confiscation, abortion without restrictions, racial reparations, taxing unrealized gains, electric vehicle mandates, the police, etc.
Mr. Trump avoided damaging himself in the debate, managed to remind voters that Ms. Harris has become unburdened from the issues that had been previously important to her, and even noted once or twice that Ms. Harris is the same Ms. Harris who is President Biden’s vice president. Mr. Trump did wander a bit at times, but the wanderings were within the range of the expected.
All things considered, there is probably a slight advantage to Ms. Harris.
Does it matter? Probably not. The race remains centered on about 500,000 votes in seven states. More importantly, many of these voters are members of the working class, a group that — while they do not turn out as energetically as voters “educated” at college — still accounts for 60% of voters on Election Day. More ominously for the Harris campaign, in all seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the share of working-class voters is almost certainly higher than the national average.
Among this cohort of voters, Ms. Harris trails Mr. Trump by 17 points, according to the most recent New York Times/Siena survey. For contextual purposes, that is about the same as Mr. Biden’s performance among working-class voters. The bad news for Ms. Harris? In 2020, Mr. Biden lost this group by 4 points.
I mention all this because, after the debate, a CNN survey found that Mr. Trump held a solid 20-point advantage on whom voters trusted more to manage the economy, an increase from the 16-point lead he had before the debate. Among working-class voters, Mr. Trump’s advantage on the economy is 32 points; his advantage among the working class on immigration is 37 points.
To most voters, the debate changed little in a race that has been a referendum on Mr. Trump for at least the last nine months. They still see Mr. Trump as the right answer on the two most important issues: the economy and immigration. More talk from the Harris campaign is not likely to change that.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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