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The Debate Over Debates Is Over, at Least for Now
Donald Trump’s rejection of a second meeting with Kamala Harris may or may not be final. But it could complicate his effort to portray her as ducking tough questions.
Kamala Harris was planning to challenge Donald J. Trump to another debate no matter what happened on Tuesday night in Philadelphia. A statement from her campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, had been drafted in advance. And after a brief huddle, her advisers hit send on it within minutes of the debate’s ending.
“That was fun,” Brian Fallon, one of her top communications advisers, who was in a holding room at the National Constitution Center, quickly wrote on X. “Let’s do it again in October.”
But for now, at least, the vice president’s hopes for a second televised confrontation with Mr. Trump have been dashed. The former president ruled out participating in another debate on Thursday.
“We’ve done two debates and because they were successful, there will be no third debate,” Mr. Trump said in Tucson, Ariz., after two days of public vacillations, referring to his debate with President Biden in June and with Ms. Harris on Tuesday.
The stance is a far cry from his bravado this spring when Mr. Trump was set to run against Mr. Biden. Then, he promised to debate “anybody, anytime, anyplace” and offered donors T-shirts with a photoshopped image of a shirtless Mr. Trump wearing boxing gloves.
It’s also an inversion of the usual dynamics in which the candidate who struggled onstage, or is behind in the polls, demands a rematch. Ms. Harris was widely viewed as putting Mr. Trump on the defensive throughout their clash, baiting him with talk about people leaving his rallies and the inheritance he received from his father.
“Donald Trump did not look like he was having a very good time,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, “and my first thought at the end of the debate was that I doubted he would be demanding another one.”
Decisions for Mr. Trump are more often situational than final, and he could reverse himself in the coming weeks if the polls shifted or coverage turned against him. That said, he skipped the first 2024 Republican primary debate while holding a strong lead — and never attended any others as his lead held steady.
But the Harris team is not taking no for an answer just yet.
“We don’t consider that the last word at all,” Mr. Fallon said in a brief interview. “Just as he flipped and flopped and flipped again on the ABC debate, he is very prone to changing his mind. And we’re very interested in an October debate and plan to actively keep pushing.”
Mr. Trump has tried to make Ms. Harris’s unwillingness to subject herself to rigorous questioning by the news media and unscripted settings a focus on the trail. But those arguments may lose some punch if he is the one dodging a direct confrontation with her. He fielded questions from journalists at a news conference on Friday in California. He previously called a news conference in New York but took no questions.
There have been conversations with NBC News about a potential debate in October, according to two people involved in the discussions. However, it was unclear if Mr. Trump’s team would remain involved in those talks or how advanced they have been. He had previously agreed to a Sept. 25 debate on NBC, which Ms. Harris declined. A spokesman for NBC declined to comment.
In his news conference Friday, at a golf course he owns in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Mr. Trump suggested he might again change his mind about another debate with Ms. Harris. “Maybe if I got in the right mood, I don’t know,” he said.
The race remains closely knotted in the battleground states. Any impact of the debate will probably not be reflected in public surveys until next week. The Trump team tried to get ahead of those polls by framing the debate as a nonevent and releasing an internal poll on Thursday that showed Ms. Harris’s support as being flat.
“Despite the best efforts of Kamala Harris and media to portray the debate as some kind of overwhelming win for her, voters did not see it this way,” Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump’s pollster, wrote in a memo about the internal poll.
One reason that the Harris team is still pushing for another debate is that her allies and advisers see one of the keys to winning in 2024 — when voter opinion on the direction of the nation remains sour — as keeping the public focused on the possibility of Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.
“We owe it to the voters,” Ms. Harris said on Thursday as she campaigned in North Carolina.
On Friday, her campaign cut the first ad from debate footage and began to air it on television in key states. It was a 60-second spot focused on abortion. It begins with Mr. Trump taking credit for overturning Roe v. Wade and continues with Ms. Harris talking about its consequences.
“I think the American people believe that certain freedoms — in particular the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body — should not be made by the government,” Ms. Harris says in the ad.
Her team also released a memo highlighting “five toxic positions” Mr. Trump took in the debate. The first was on abortion.
Tricia McLaughlin, a Republican strategist who advised Vivek Ramaswamy during his 2024 campaign, highlighted Ms. Harris’s meandering answer to the debate’s first question, about whether voters were better off economically than four years ago, as one of her weakest moments.
But Ms. McLaughlin said Mr. Trump failed to capitalize on that and other openings. “He did not effectively prosecute the case,” she said. As for the chance for a redo, she presumed his advisers were thinking, “Why would we want to do a déjà vu debate?”
The stakes of whether or not to debate again are significant. Without another meeting, neither Ms. Harris nor Mr. Trump is likely to command anywhere near the 67.1 million Americans who tuned in live to Tuesday’s debate, according to Nielsen. The first Harris-Trump debate was the most watched event of the year after the Super Bowl.
That means if there isn’t a second debate, no other singular moment is likely to shift the political conversation or galvanize supporters ahead of the election.
Mr. Trump does appear to be consuming the post-debate coverage. He posted on social media attacking the Fox News host Neil Cavuto, who interviewed Mr. Trump’s new supporter, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Mr. Kennedy said in that interview that Ms. Harris had a better debate.
“People said that I was angry at the debate,” Mr. Trump said in Arizona. “Angry. I was angry.” He explained that “yes, I am angry,” but that his anger was because of what he described as the flood of migrants into the country.
In the days since the debate, Mr. Trump and his allies have also taken to attacking ABC News and its moderators, Linsey Davis and David Muir. He called Ms. Davis “nasty” — his familiar attack on women who challenge him — and mocked Mr. Muir’s hair.
The moderators fact-checked Mr. Trump multiple times, including on his wild and unverified claims that immigrants are eating pets in a town in Ohio.
For now, this most unusual election year is set to have both the earliest ever general election debate — the June one that drove President Biden from the race — and the earliest ever final debate.
Now, the debating finale is set to be a clash of running mates, with Senator JD Vance and Gov. Tim Walz scheduled to square off on Oct. 1 on CBS News.
Reid J. Epstein and Michael Gold contributed reporting.
Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent, covering the 2024 campaign and the major developments, trends and forces shaping American politics. He can be reached at shane.goldmacher@nytimes.com. More about Shane Goldmacher
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
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