This is a bold move, and can only be explained by Duane Patterson’s question: “If Kamala Won the Debate, Why Is Trump Gaining Ground?” Counter-intuitive as it may seem — because Trump had a lousy debate performance — it appears that many undecided voters moved in favor of Trump as a result. Or, to put it another way, these voters didn’t see from Kamala Harris whatever it was they had needed to see in order to vote for her. If you have ever actually talked to a “swing” voter, you know that they are, shall we say, idiosyncratic. So while it may seem inexplicable how Trump could have “won” that debate, in terms of persuading undecided voters, we’ll find out on November 5 — or in the wee hours of the morning of November 6 — whether Trump’s hunch is right. Obviously, he thinks he’s got this thing in the bag. His gut tells him that most people don’t want to vote for Kamala, no more than they wanted to vote for Hillary. For the sake of America, let’s hope he’s right.
If any of your Democrat friends try to provoke you into an argument about who won Tuesday night’s debate, avoid the provocation by agreeing that Kamala “won,” and end the conversation immediately.
“Never smarten up a chump” — don’t let them in on the secret that Harris’s debate “victory” is unlikely to make any difference.
This is why Democrats were caught by surprise in 2016. They were paying attention to the media and didn’t understand that Trump voters were not deterred by any of his scandals or “gaffes.” This was a mistake that I myself made. After the “Access Hollywood” tapes went public, I declared in early October 2016 that there was no way Trump could win — how could anyone survive that? On Election Day, I went out and voted for Trump, then came home to watch the results on TV and was amazed to see state after state turn red on the map. Incredible!
Was any voter really undecided before Tuesday? I suppose that all the regular readers here had made up their mind to vote for Trump long ago. Your choice was not in the least changed, was it? Ditto all the Harris voters — they were never going to be persuaded to vote for Trump, no matter what. They’d vote for a turnip if it had a “D” next to it. Who were the “undecided” voters, and why were they undecided? I have trouble imagining such people exist, and can’t begin to explain the motives for their indecision. But if they were leaning toward voting for Trump, why would they change their minds simply because he was extra-Trumpish during the debate? The man is a known quantity, for good or ill.
OK, I will concede that Kamala Harris "won" the debate. Now, will some Democrat please admit IT DOESN'T MATTER? pic.twitter.com/8Gr8SvQW8y
Like a lot of other Trump voters, I was disappointed by his performance, but not really surprised, and certainly was not persuaded to vote for Kamala. I am against the Democratic Party, period, and my chief regret is that not every one of the 74,000,000 Trump voters are as staunchly anti-Democrat as I am. I voted for Trump despite Trump being Trump, and will do it again, and am therefore not an accurate bellwether of how an “undecided” voter might react to Trump being Trump.
My point is that I don’t think any Trump supporter should feel discouraged about the election because of Tuesday’s debate. If you have liberal friends who are whooping it up in celebration, the thing to do is to pretend you don’t notice. Don’t start any arguments, and don’t let yourself be baited into any arguments. Democrats are going to be Democrats, and why waste time arguing with fools?
Former President Donald Trump came out hot during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, while ABC’s moderators fact-checked just one side of the stage.
Trump and Harris met for the first time in their political careers on ABC News’s debate stage in a 90 minute contest that featured no live audience, muted mics and moderators that left many conservative viewers frustrated. As ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis continuously corrected Trump and left Harris un-checked, the vice president baited the former president into fiery moments by teasing him about rally crowd size and his 2020 loss. . . .
Though Harris dodged questions on her numerous policy flip-flops and whether Americans are better off under her administration than Trump’s, pundits and media personalities suggested that the vice president presented herself better than her opponent. A CNN flash poll of debate watchers found that 63% said Harris had won the debate, compared to 37% for Trump. The same sample of individuals said pre-debate they were split 50-50 on who they expected to win.
Her campaign apparently thought so too, because minutes after the forum ended, they began calling for a second debate in October.
Trump, meanwhile, was noticeably louder and more aggressive than in his debate against President Joe Biden, where the Republican nominee largely stood quietly by while his opponent imploded.
“She conveyed the calm. Did she answer all the questions about the switches? No. But I thought he would’ve raised that,” former congressman Harold Ford said in Fox News’ post show.
“She came out ahead of him in my opinion, no doubt,” Brit Hume, Fox News political analyst, responded to Ford. “She was calm, she was prepared.”
The first presidential debate this year was such a huge Trump victory that Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid a few weeks later, resulting in Kamala Harris being anointed as the Democrat nominee. What are the chances that Kamala Harris will do better than Joe did against Trump? We’ll see. Feel free to use the comments as a sort of open thread. While I don’t expect to live-blog the debate, I will try to throw some new stuff in periodically. Maybe the topic of Haitians eating cats will come up.
UPDATE 9:13 p.m. ET: So what they decided to do was, first, ask Kamala about the Biden economic agenda. She doesn’t say anything in defense of Bidenomics, but instead talks about what various things she’s promising to do if elected. Then it’s Trump’s turn, and then they just keep going back and forth — Harris, Trump, Harris, Trump. I don’t know who’s winning this, but it’s annoying the hell out of me.
Vice President Kamala Harris is asked if Americans are better off now than they were under former President Donald Trump.
She did NOT answer the question and lied about Trump's economic plan.
UPDATE 9:21 p.m. ET: One-liner of the night: “Run, Spot, run!”
"She doesn't have a plan. It's like four sentences. Run, Spot, Run." — Trump's disparagement of Kamala's Biden-copied plan made my viewing gallery laugh.
UPDATE 10:09 p.m. ET: Wow, this is an awful, awful TV show. I suppose Kamala Harris’s supporters think she’s winning, while Trump has to not only debate his opponent, but also the ABC “moderators” who (a) keep telling lies while “fact-checking” him, and (b) never fact-check any of Kamala’s lies. Trump supporters are probably unhappy, but I don’t imagine they think their guy is losing. Probably the net impact of this whole thing is a wash, but my hunch is that a lot of viewers just tuned out after 30 or 45 minutes of squabbling.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: "When are the people that burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted?" pic.twitter.com/PxoeDd1M0U
UPDATE 10:28 p.m. ET: Folks, I’ve had as much of this as I can stand. Maybe tomorrow, after three or four cups of coffee, I’ll do a roundup of post-debate reaction, but I’m heading to bed now. Good night!
“Those 20,000 Haitians did not show up overnight or uninvited. Though flown in by the federal government, they were not forced on the city by the federal government. Elections have consequences. Springfield voted for this. They signaled their virtue, their signal was seen, and virtue arrived. This is what they wanted. This is what they got. They’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Much commentary has focused on whether it’s true that pets are being killed and eaten by the Haitians, but that’s not really the point. The point is why Springfield became the destination for thousands of Haitians (who may or may not eat cats).
It’s a long story. First of all, you’ll find liberals insisting that these Haitians are not illegal immigrants. Research further, however, and you learn that most of them entered the country illegally, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border after making their way through Central America. After Haiti descended into its latest crisis, the Biden administration granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to all Haitians in the U.S., so you may say that they have been retroactively (but temporarily) “legalized.”
Now let’s talk about Springfield, which is a “blue” island of liberalism in a sea of Republican “red.” Ohio was once a battleground state, closely contested in every presidential election, and then Trump came along and the Buckeye State has now become a GOP stronghold. Springfield was a city of 58,662 residents before the Haitian influx, and the city sits in Clark County (population 136,000) which voted 61% for Trump in 2020.
You see that, if the Democrats can turn these Haitians into voters, they can make Clark County “blue,” and a similar calculus is being applied nationwide by the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Democrats insist that the “Great Replacement” is a right-wing conspiracy theory, but we can see them doing it — blatantly, deliberately, in front of our eyes — in places like Springfield. And this brings us to the late Warren Copeland.
For most of the past three decades, Copeland was the mayor of Springfield. He was a professor at Wittenberg University, a local institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Anyone who knows anything about the ELCA will tell you it is the pluperfect example of degenerate liberal Protestantism. “The ELCA has drifted so far into pagan goddess worship that to call it ‘Lutheranism’ is an insult to Luther; to call it ‘Christian’ is blasphemy,” as I wrote in 2016. Copeland was a radical obsessed with “social justice,” and the fact that Springfield repeatedly elected him as their mayor tells you something about the politics of the city. Indeed, Springfield eagerly welcomed the influx of Haitians. Read this article from December 2022:
A surge in the number of Springfield residents from Haiti has resulted in an outpouring of language assistance and additional forms of help from the Springfield City School District and others who are trying to meet their needs. “Four years ago we didn’t have a Haitian population,” says Pamela Shay, director of federal programs for Springfield City School District.
Now the district has about 200 students from Haitian families, many speaking Haitian Creole, French or Spanish, she says. In the past, the district has had two or three bilingual assistants who speak students’ native languages in order to help in classrooms and communicate with parents. Now the district has nine, she says.
“I think we will see growth continue for a few years,” Shay says. . . .
Estimates about the number of Springfield and Clark County residents from Haiti vary. Shay says she has been told there are about 7,500 Haitians in the area, although she suspects the number is lower based on the number of students enrolled in the school district.
Davah Germain says there were already several thousand people from Haiti when he arrived in Springfield almost two years ago, and he suspects that number might have doubled in the meantime.
“And people are still coming,” he says.
Germain left Haiti due to political issues and moved to Miami, Fla., in 1985. The 63-year-old moved to Springfield at the urging of a friend. Word is spreading about the ease in which newcomers can find jobs, particularly in manufacturing.
“They’re coming to stay,” he says. “They’re coming to make Springfield their home.” . . .
Germain . . . translates for the Springfield District Council of St. Vincent de Paul.
Peggy Johnson is a longtime volunteer with the council, and she oversees its community navigator program to help the local Haitian and Hispanic communities.
“I applied for a grant last year when I started to see a lot of Haitians moving into town,” she says. That $10,000 grant from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, along with another $10,000 from a private organization in Springfield, is helping the program fund 20 hours of services each week. The organization also now has two Haitians employed who speak Haitian Creole and Spanish. The extra services started in September.
You see? According to the school system official, as recently as 2018, Springfield didn’t have any Haitians, but by 2022, the number had reached an estimated 7,500, and now it’s believed to be at least 15,000. And the city did everything to assist and support the Haitians, effectively encouraging still more to come. The Biden administration’s decision to grant TPS to all Haitians — no matter how they got into the country — means that no Haitian can be deported, and every Haitian in the country is now eligible for employment, Social Security cards, Medicaid, etc. The liberals in Springfield, the ones who made Warren Copeland the city’s mayor for nearly 30 years, voted for this policy. They approved it.
A Haitian man charged with causing a bus crash in which 11-year-old Aiden Clark was killed and more than two dozen other students were injured was previously caught and released at the US border.
Hermanio Joseph, 35, was driving with an invalid license when his Honda Odyssey minivan veered over the center line and collided with a Northwestern Local Schools bus on Troy Road in Lawrenceville, Ohio, on August 22. . . .
Aiden was ejected from the bus and was pronounced dead at the scene. Another student suffered life-threatening injuries and 26 children sustained minor injuries. . . .
Joseph and his passenger, Roberto Mompremier, 37, suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were taken to hospital for treatment.
He produced a Mexican driver’s license to Ohio State Highway Patrol officers at the scene but this was invalid due to his immigration status.
Joseph is registered as a Haitian immigrant in the state of Florida and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman confirmed he arrived at the US-Mexico border in August 2022.
He was given notice to appear in federal immigration court by the Department of Homeland Security before he was released under the Biden Administration’s border policies.
Hermanio Joseph
So never mind if Haitians are eating cats, because the fact is that Haitians are killing actual human beings, including this 11-year-old kid from Lawrenceville, a crossroads about 7 miles north of Springfield.
It was not Aidan Clark’s fault that the Biden administration adopted a “catch-and-release” policy for illegal immigrants. It was not Aidan Clark’s policy that the liberals in Springfield welcomed thousands of Haitians to their city. Hermanio Joseph has been sentenced to prison, but this hardly suffices to clear the blood-guilt for Aidan Clark’s death, and the people responsible are not just the residents of Springfield. Yet they have brought a curse upon their city, which I expect will soon cease to be recognizable as an American city. Springfield, Ohio, is going to turn into a cesspool of misery, bearing no resemblance to what it was when the first Haitians arrived there. This sad fate is not something I approve — were it in my power, I would prevent it– but at the same time, I cannot deny that it is what Springfield deserves. They have invited their own destruction.
Remember: Whenever a "disinformation expert" tells us that something is a "baseless claim," it always turns out to be 100% true. https://t.co/SL61iLTzEc
