Tea leaves favour Hillary Clinton
The Democratic Party candidate has won the first of three US presidential debates with her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump. It’s not done and dusted yet. She must press home this advantage in the next few weeks to win the election
Nothing makes the morning coffee smell so good as a live election debate for a politics junkie. I am unabashedly one and so I watched for close to 100 minutes on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump spar in the first of the three American presidential debates, with the attention and enthusiasm I normally reserve for World Cup cricket matches or Steven Spielberg films.
The debate, as The New York Times editorial immediately afterwards put it, was between one candidate who was serious and the other, a vacuous bully. It began with an unusually restrained Trump, who was even being deferential to Clinton by repeatedly referring to her as “Secretary Clinton” in preference to his usual epithet of “Crooked Hillary”. By all accounts he made some convincing points on how international trade arrangements were beginning to hurt the United States in terms of jobs and made even Clinton backtrack on her earlier characterisation of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership as the “gold standard” of such treaties.
But soon it was all downhill for him. On the next topic, that of race relations, he took a swipe at Clinton by saying that he visited the inner cities of Philadelphia and other metros while she did not travel. Her repartee that yes, she was preparing for the debate and indeed, to be the president, hit home hard and Trump never recovered from that blow. He waffled on his tax returns, on being prosecuted for discrimination against African Americans in his construction projects in 1973 and his patent disrespect for women, especially women of colour, all of which made him sink lower and lower. His handling of his poisonous role in the Obama birther controversy was replete with evasions and untruths, as it had been earlier. His handling of national security concerns showed his utter lack of experience.
When the moderator questioned him about his assertion that Clinton did not look presidential, Trump’s reply was that he had talked about her stamina. Clinton’s wry smile was the last torpedo for the sinking Trump ship. She followed it up with a statement that she would accept his observation after he had visited 112 countries, negotiates countless treaties and deals and sitting through 11 hours of Congressional grilling. No more needed to be said thereafter. And Trump’s attempts to obliquely hint at the personal lives of the Clintons was just plain pathetic.
My immediate impression was that Clinton had won hands-down. An hour or so later, the first CNN poll, admittedly not a representative one since the sample was confined to debate watchers and had a larger than national average proportion of Democrats, confirmed it by a margin of 62 per cent to 27. This large margin suggests that Clinton is likely to prevail in a poll of even a more representative sample, which we will soon know.
All this must bring great relief to a large section of Americans and the world at large, who would concur with the editorial opinion of the venerable The New York Times which stated, “We believe Mr Trump to be the worst nominee put forward by a major party in modern American history” while unequivocally endorsing Clinton (September 25, 2016).
The recent polls have narrowed the once formidable gap between the two candidates. Nate Silver, arguably the most reliable and apolitical poll analyst, has been running a website FiveThirtyEight.com, which tracks all major polls continuously. It uses several models to predict the possibilities of wins by the major candidates. Clinton’s number was at its peak at 70 per cent as recently as a month ago. It started slipping in the first week of September. Now the winning possibility hovers around 55 per cent for her.
The latest average of national polls shows Clinton at around 42 per cent and Trump about 1.5 percentage points behind. That would be a dead heat, statistically. Those figures most probably represent core votes for the two major candidates. The key is the large body of the undecided, about 18 per cent (around 10, if third party and minor candidates are included). This debate and the two more that are to follow, as also the carpet-bombing campaign in the next month and a half, are for the hearts and minds of these fence sitters, as the converted for either candidate are unlikely to be swayed. This debate would convince a significant proportion of them that Trump’s bluff and bluster do not quite cut the mustard.
But it is not done and dusted yet; in fact, far from it. Four years ago, Barack Obama had stumbled in the first debate with Mitt Romney. He came across as a weary and wary chief executive, who seemed to have lost his zest for the job, was shifty and at times hesitant in his responses and appeared set for a defeat. The CNN post-debate poll that early October 2012 handed the debate to Romney by almost the same margin (6725) as it did the first one to Clinton. But Obama pulled up his socks, won the next two debates and more importantly, the November elections. Here is hoping that this recent precedent does not hold this year and Clinton realises that Trump is faltering, as The New York Times columnist J D Vance observed. She should press home the advantage she has gained and prove right our own Surjit Bhalla, a self-confessed armchair analyst like this writer, by winning conclusively in six weeks’ time.