Donald Trump faces fresh doubt after debate performance

Good morning and welcome to US Election Countdown. I just landed in the swing state of North Carolina ahead of Kamala Harris’s first post-debate rally. Before I find some voters to talk to, let’s get into:

• Where Trump goes from here

• Inside the former president’s criminal trial

• The shift left among young US women

Donald Trump’s campaign is reeling after Kamala Harris outfoxed him during Tuesday night’s debate.

His Republican allies thought he was unprepared and erratic, leaving them unamused by a performance that “showed Trump at his absolute worst,” as Republican pollster Frank Luntz said. [free to read]

Trump was thrown off balance when Harris entered the race almost two months ago, and he hasn’t been able to get back on sure footing. The debate was an opportunity for Trump to take back the reins from the Democrats, especially since it was looking like the vice-president’s honeymoon period was ending.

“I think it was a missed opportunity to knock her out . . . She was losing momentum. I think it probably stabilised her,” a top Trump donor told the Financial Times.

Those in Trump’s camp especially didn’t like that he took the bait when she overtly tried to get under his skin.

“The biggest frustration about his performance is he took the bait on nonsense stuff, which prevented him from closing the deal. So definitely a missed opportunity,” said one senior Republican strategist close to Trump.

Trump donor John Catsimatidis, the billionaire New York City grocery magnate, said “maybe he was overconfident. Maybe he didn’t prepare. Maybe he was just tired.”

Harris delivered a series of blows on issues from abortion to Trump’s fitness for office, and antagonised him about the crowd sizes at his rallies. Trump couldn’t get a handle on his anger at times and veered off message.

Luntz said he thought the former president should agree to another debate to another face-off to try to recover.

“He was given so many opportunities . . . every time inflation could have been raised, he chose to divert to a different issue,” Luntz said. “Did [Harris] rattle him? Absolutely. Should he have been rattled? No way. But it is who he is.”

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Behind the scenes

Lawyer Todd Blanche was shocked when he got a call from Trump in February 2023, asking him to represent the ex-president in his New York “hush money” case.

The chance to represent Trump was appealing to Blanche, both in terms of his own ambition and his view that everybody deserves fair treatment in the legal system. He told himself that the power brokers in his field — and the country — would deem his actions honourable.

More importantly, he told himself he could handle Trump.

Those familiar with the inner workings of Trump’s defence said Blanch proposed a deal: he wouldn’t try to curb what Trump said about the case on social media or on television, but otherwise, they would do things his way. His methods, however, did not work, as Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts.

Despite his desire to be an archetype of legal virtue, he may well be remembered as the lawyer who oversaw a heinous first in the country’s jurisprudence. After the trial, Blanche fell into a funk, but he’s not done: he successfully argued that Trump should not be sentenced until after the election

“I don’t think we lost this at trial,” Blanche told the FT’s Joe Miller. “You gotta ask yourself, as a society, are you cool with that?”

But a Trump loss in November could revitalise several criminal cases.

As one of Trump’s lawyers conceded to Joe: “If he loses, we’re fucked.”

Keep reading Joe’s profile of Blanche here.

Datapoint

There is a surge in young US women identifying as liberal, which could be a boost to Harris at the polls on November 5 if they turn out in droves.

Harris campaign officials said that in the first hour of the debate, 71 per cent of its “grassroots” donors were women.

The portion of young women — those aged 18 to 29 — who describe themselves as politically liberal has shot up by more than 10 percentage points since 2001, increasing the most during the Trump and Biden presidencies, according to new data from Gallup. Among young men, however, 25 per cent identified as liberal or very liberal, the same proportion that did during George W Bush’s presidency.

From 2001 to 2007, about 28 per cent of young women identified as liberal, 3 percentage points higher than young men. This jumped to 32 per cent of young women from 2008 to 2016, 5 points higher than young men. And it climbed further to 40 per cent of young women from 2017 to 2024 — a stark 15 points higher than young men.

It’s not that women are changing their views as they get older, but that successive cohorts of women in this age bracket are becoming more liberal, with a big swell among young millennial and Gen Z women.

Their shift left is being driven by increasingly liberal stances on the environment, abortion, guns and race relations.

Viewpoints