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I actually found Harris pretty impressive - she didn't get flustered or lost in word-salads, her responses were clear and coherent, and perhaps most importantly she seemed relaxed and calm. And while there's maybe some bias there on my part, I will state for the record that yesterday a few hours before the debate I was reading about the Springfield affair and told my wife that "at this point if I were a US citizen I might actually vote for Trump." So in that sense, I was a 'floating non-voter', and Harris would have won me over.
As for Trump, he seemed like he'd been spending too much time on right-twitter, or more likely had learned his applause-lines from his rallies where the audience is guaranteed to know about the latest scandals. It was probably the closest to Alex Jones vibes I've ever got from him, partly in terms of content (some very silly claims, like "Israel won't exist in two years if she becomes President") but mainly in terms of vibes. Particularly in the second half of the debate, he seemed angry, harried, paranoid, even delusional. Not his finest hour at all, and it seemed like a lot of unforced errors. If he'd stuck to messaging around the economy, used migration mainly as a competence issue ("Harris was made Border Tsar, well let me ask you this, do you the American people think she has done a good job of that?"), moved to the center at least rhetorically on foreign policy issues (why exactly couldn't he say it was in America's interests for Ukraine to win?), and made a more concerted effort to tar Harris with the failures of the Biden administration, I think he could have won.
Oh come on. You’ve been posting on The Motte, how long, since the SSC subreddit days? But you claim to be an innocent undecided after everything that was happened? Even if somehow you are undecided, you are the most atypical undecided imaginable.
This is why he did win. Everyone came away understanding that he had the winning hand on almost every issue. Whether he “won the debate” is irrelevant. Nobody says to themselves “I agree with Trump on everything, but since he was ineloquent I guess have no choice but to vote for Kamala. Sorry, I’m coconut-tree gang now.”
Trump persuaded people on the issues. On the other hand, I honestly can’t even remember one thing Kamala said.
You're right that I'm definitely very atypical of 'undecided voters', but I never said "innocent"! If anything, I think my indecision is a consequence of having been massively saturated with high quality arguments for both left- and right-wing worldviews, creating a kind of political bistability, in which small changes in my mood or the news cycle triggers political gestalt shifts.
Relatedly, I'm reminded of a fun anecdote from my college days. I was discussing capital punishment with a friend - let's call him Bob - who was an extremely successful competitive debater (British Parliamentary, not the Lincoln-Douglas crap).
I asked him, "Bob, what are the best arguments in favour of capital punishment?" "Oh, that's easy doglatine. Consider the following...", and he gave me a long list of arguments, evidence, and data.
I next asked him, "Hmm, and what are the best arguments against capital punishment?" "That's also very straightforward. We can group these into seven main types, as follows..." and gave me another cavalcade of arguments and facts from ethics, political theory, law, and social science.
Finally, I asked him, "So what about you, Bob? Are you pro- or anti-capital punishment?"
After a long pause he said "God, that's a hard question, I have absolutely no idea."
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I wouldn't be surprised if mottizens are actually disproportionally chronically undecided. As far as my understanding goes, especially the rare posters and lurkers are still mostly disgruntled left-leaning grey tribers, disliking the woke far-left wing but not enough to make the full jump to the right. Especially since the right keeps nominating people like Trump, who are at the very least just personally very unappealing.
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Try to resist the urge to speak for “everyone,” especially when you’re acting this hostile.
It’s been quite a while since your last warning, but you haven’t really done anything else in the meantime. If you’re just here to stump for Trump, put some more substance into it.
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Eh, I disagree here. I was pretty pro-Trump going in, but after watching the debate performance I'm rating Kamala much more highly.
For me it's probably between voting for Trump and not voting at all though. Watching that debate, seeing how angry and flustered Trump was, how he didn't seem to have coherent plans besides just railing about how bad the democrats were, really frustrated me.
I was hoping he'd talk about the deficit, about bringing in Elon to increase government efficiency and cut, talk about nuclear and crypto. All things he's discussed on podcasts recently. But he just stuck to his same old annoying, and frankly disturbing angry populist rhetoric. Not a good look for moderates at all.
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