| | | | |  | | By Charlie Mahtesian | Presented by Citi | | 
Former President Donald Trump arrives to debate Vice President Kamala Harris for the ABC News presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images | SHORT MEMORY — The post-debate flash polls, trending topics on X [“THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS”], cable news chyrons and ‘takeaways’ stories all underscore what every honest observer of Tuesday’s presidential debate knows: Kamala Harris won the evening, and it wasn’t even close. The result has been a wave of euphoria on the left, an uptick in Harris’ fortunes in betting markets, a downturn in the stock price of the parent company of Donald Trump’s social-media company, Truth Social, and a ripple across cryptocurrency markets, where Trump’s prospects — he is viewed as the pro-crypto candidate — are closely followed. In other words, there’s a widespread perception that Trump did serious damage to his chances of winning with his undisciplined and largely incoherent debate performance. It’s a dangerous assumption. Worse for Democrats, it’s a misread that risks breeding the kind of complacency that put him in the White House in 2016. It’s worth remembering that snap polls conducted after every presidential debate in 2016 and 2020 also judged Trump to be the loser — and by wide margins. Public opinion polls in general underestimated the level of support for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. Trump has been impeached twice, been held liable for sexual abuse, faced 88 criminal counts — been found guilty of 34 — effectively ended Roe v. Wade, insulted the sacrifices of soldiers, and punctured nearly every shibboleth in politics. All the while, the GOP lost the House, Senate and White House on his watch. And yet despite all that and more, here we are, 55 days out from the election, and Trump still remains in a photo-finish race. He is either in the lead or within striking distance in every battleground state. What it suggests is that the questions raised by Trump’s debate performance — about his temperament, divisiveness, lies, contradictions, and lack of policy command — are already priced in. A single debate doesn’t change that. It’s hard to imagine a more successful start to a campaign than the one Harris has achieved in roughly six weeks time. She is reassembling the Democratic coalition, minting money, and driving enthusiasm levels across the party. Her early success is clearly unnerving Trump, as evidenced yet again in Tuesday’s debate. But there’s still a long way to go. Voter perceptions about the economy remain a point of serious vulnerability for Harris. The recent New York Times/Siena College poll finding that Americans essentially view Trump as the more moderate candidate — 47 percent think she’s too liberal, compared to just 32 percent who think he’s too conservative — should be alarming. While there is plenty of evidence suggesting there is a ceiling to Trump’s support — and little proof he’s successfully addressing the gender chasm or winning over undecided voters — his strength among low propensity voters means his actual level of support will remain under the radar until the end. Even the strength of Trump’s ground game is a mystery — just as in 2016 and 2020, there are conflicting reports about the potency of the campaign’s get out the vote efforts. What is certain is that Trump suffered a beatdown. The giveaway is his finger pointing at the debate moderators, and his insistence that the event was rigged. But the most important political lesson of the Trump era applies here. When all the corners of elite thinking are in agreement — whether it’s on social media, Wall Street, the Beltway, print newsrooms or in cable TV green rooms — it’s best to be very skeptical. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmahtesian@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie.
| | A message from Citi: The global healthcare system is in need of a checkup. Life expectancy in many western countries has stalled over the past 15 years, while healthcare costs are rising to potentially unsustainable levels. The new Citi GPS Report, Future of Healthcare, sheds light on key strategies that could revolutionize our healthcare system – such as restructuring healthcare delivery and harnessing data-integrated digital technology. Learn more here. | | | | | — Johnson forced to delay vote on stopgap funding plan as GOP opposition rises: House GOP leaders pulled their six-month stopgap funding plan today, hours before a scheduled floor vote. Facing a number of Republican holdouts, Speaker Mike Johnson said they’ll delay the vote until next week as they work to quell Republican opposition and “build consensus.” The measure has crumbled amid mounting criticism from conservatives, defense hawks and other Republican factions, and it’s unclear that more time will help save the bill unless leaders make drastic changes. House GOP leaders have been already been whipping the bill, and nearly a dozen Republicans have publicly said they plan to vote against it. The package would fund the government through March 28 and is combined with legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, known as the SAVE Act. — White House finalizing plans to expand where Ukraine can hit inside Russia: The White House is finalizing a plan to ease some restrictions on how Ukraine can use U.S.-donated weapons and better protect itself from Russian missiles, according to a Western official and two other people familiar with the discussions. The details of the plan are still coming together. But officials in Washington, London and Kyiv have in recent days discussed expanding the area inside Russia that Ukraine can hit with American and British-made weapons. They’ve also discussed how to prevent additional cross-border attacks by Russia, including the U.S. agreeing to allow Ukraine to use U.K. long-range missiles that contain American parts to strike inside Russia. — Election officials urge Postal Service to fix delivery problems with mail-in ballots: State and local election officials from around the U.S. issued a warning today about the Postal Service’s ability to distribute and collect mail-in ballots as early voting for the presidential election has already started. The two main professional organizations of election officials said in a joint letter to U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that he should immediately take measures to address widespread problems that have already disrupted voting during this year’s primaries.
| | ROUND TWO? — Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the second-ranking Senate Republican, told The Associated Press that Trump should look to debate Harris again, and needs to force her to “defend her record on the border and on inflation and a lot of other issues on which she has flip-flopped.” “Frankly, it probably could have been better last night, but I think there will be other opportunities,” Thune said. RATINGS RISE — The debate stage clash between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump drew at least 57.5 million viewers, writes NBC News. The early viewership estimate from ABC News, which hosted the matchup, represents an improvement over the debate between President Joe Biden and Trump in late June, which attracted roughly 51.3 million people, according to the media analytics company Nielsen. SWIFT BOAT — In a statement to NBC News, The General Services Administration confirmed that as of 2 p.m. ET, 337,826 people have visited a custom URL that Taylor Swift posted on Instagram last night when she announced she was endorsing Harris. The custom URL directs people to vote.gov, a website that helps visitors to register to vote in their state. THE POLISH VOTE — It’s not often that Polish Americans — specifically those in Pennsylvania, where 5% of people say they have Polish ancestry — get a shout-out on the national debate stage, writes the Philadelphia Inquirer. But the moment showed that Kamala Harris appeared to have done her homework in the hopes of grabbing the attention of more than 700,000 Polish Americans in the commonwealth who are consistently civically engaged. Michael Blichasz, president of the Polish American Cultural Center in Philadelphia, said he was “pleased” to hear the vice president mention Polish American Pennsylvanians, a historically reliable voting bloc for Democrats, though Republicans have also lobbied for their votes.
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Protests occur in Mexico City after the approval by the Senate of the judicial reform proposed by the government today. Mexico will be the first country in the world to elect all its judges by popular vote after the approval of the reform. | Rodrigo Oropeza/AFP via Getty Images | HIT THE POLLS — Mexico’s Senate voted early today to overhaul the country’s judiciary, clearing the biggest hurdle for a controversial constitutional revision that will make all judges stand for election, a change that critics fear will politicize the judicial branch and threaten Mexico’s democracy, reports The Associated Press. The approval came in two votes after hundreds of protesters pushed their way into the Senate on Tuesday, interrupting the session after it appeared that Morena, the governing party of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had lined up the necessary votes to pass the proposal. Judicial employees and law students had protested for weeks, saying the plan, under which all judges would be elected, could threaten judicial independence and undermine the system of checks and balances. The legislation sailed through the lower chamber, where Morena and its allies hold a supermajority, last week. Approval by the Senate posed the biggest obstacle and required defections from opposition parties. STRIKE ON SCHOOL — Israeli airstrikes across Gaza overnight and today hit a U.N. school sheltering displaced Palestinian families as well as two homes, killing at least 34 people, including 19 women and children, hospital officials said. Additionally, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli troops launched raids in several towns backed by airstrikes, continuing a crackdown across the territory that the military says is targeting militants but has wrecked neighborhoods and killed civilians. One airstrike killed five people the military said were militants threatening its troops. A second strike on a car killed at least three people, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
| | | | A message from Citi:   | | | | | | | | | | | AMONG US — When a man named Reinhold Kulle came to America from Germany in 1957, he was asked the requisite questions of the time: were you a member of the Nazi party? Were you a member of the Waffen-SS? It was easy for him to answer no — that he was a former elite SS member was a secret that he’d been hiding since the war. He made his way into America and then became a respected school custodian near Chicago. But when a deportation order came for him in the 1980s, his secret found out, the story tore the small town apart. In a book excerpt in Chicago Magazine, Michael Soffer writes about “the Nazi of Oak Park.”
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On this date in 2001: Dust and debris cloud the air near the site of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York. | Bernadette Tuazon/AP | Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001. But for a tiny handful of people, those memories touch American presidential history. Read Garrett Graff’s oral history of that day and those people here. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.
| | A message from Citi: Globally, the average person born today will live almost 30 years longer than someone born in 1950, perhaps one of humanity’s most astonishing achievements. But the global healthcare system’s vital signs have deteriorated recently – and in many western countries, life expectancy has stalled over the past 15 years.
A rapidly aging population is already driving healthcare system costs to potentially unsustainable levels, and in many advanced economies the cost of healthcare as a proportion of GDP has more than doubled in the past 30 years.
The new Citi GPS Report, Future of Healthcare, sheds light on key strategies that could revolutionize our healthcare system – such as reorganizing how healthcare is delivered, leveraging data-integrated digital technology, and addressing medical issues more proactively.
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