In their first face-to-face meeting, the Democratic nominee humiliated the former president.

Even so devoted a bootlicker as Senator Lindsey Graham declared the debate a “disaster” for the ex-president.

Donald Trump is so feral and narcissistic, so unrestrained and so outside the norm of American politics, that he’s difficult to debate. It’s disorienting. Very few people have been able to stand up to him without being pulled into the muck. In the past, even when he lost debates on points, he dominated his opponents.

But on a Tuesday night in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris cracked the code.

  • @Cryophilia
    15•6 days ago

    Absolutely. If the media outlets had decided that Trump won, then Trump won. Almost no one actually watched the debate. They only looked at “highlights” curated for them.

    • @taiyang
      18•6 days ago

      I mean, overnight numbers suggest it’s a second most watched TV event since Superbowl, but you’re not wrong in that people don’t necessarily pay attention or process it. Highlights are the part people grab onto and boy do we have a lot of good ones.

      • @nepenthesEnglish
        3•6 days ago

        Do you have a link to the numbers, please? I’m curious if the international numbers are reported separately.

        (Me and at least three other households I know watched it in Canada. My friend in VA did not, and hadn’t even heard about Fido til I mentioned it this afternoon.)

        • @taiyang
          3•6 days ago

          I would have but I’m getting conflicting numbers and supposedly the overnights aren’t as accurate. You’ve got the numbers from Neilson which were 67 million, that’s the latest guess.

          https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2024/over-67-million-viewers-tune-in-for-abc-news-harris-trump-debate/

          And that usually excludes streaming, but I think it’s US (maybe Canada). Higher than the first debate, but oddly lower than 2020 (maybe cause of lockdown?). I think it’s missing a very sizable chunk from international and streaming, though. If I had to guess, it’s likely double. Hell, even Taylor Swift caught it streaming.

    • modifier
      3•6 days ago

      I understand my very presence on lemmy makes me less representative of the mean but I was hooked from start to finish.