Did Harris Win the Debate?

The Vice President successfully baited Trump’s ego, but did she try too hard for culture-war sound bites?

T. J. Brearton
Some of the Dharma
Published in
9 min readSep 11, 2024

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In many ways, Trump is the first social media president. Obama made good use of social media when he ran in 2008, but without Twitter in 2016, Donald Trump would have lost the election. And without it in 2020, he likely wouldn’t have been able to build such a coalition of conspiracy theorists that stormed the capitol on Jan 6, or gathered so much sympathy for his “stolen” election.

In politics, the reductive two-party system is not new. Social polarization is not new, either — we’ve cleaved over the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, and the economy before. It’s also not new to have a politician’s words ring hollow. We’re used to what we might consider empty promises, we’re used to a politician saying they won’t ever raise taxes, then taxes go up.

There are also many bread and butter issues for people that matter most, and the politician who represents the fiscally conservative or the socially liberal is often someone they just have to stomach. Plenty of Republicans have held their noses and voted for Trump because guns are their main concern, or abortion, or taxes.

But Trump is different, and we all know it. Not different just because he’s a celebrity —…

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