I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!

I'm not watching any of the pre-debate coverage & staying offline (except for this check in). It drives me too crazy. I will be watching tonight though…..

Wow…seems I'm first here after the debate. May I take this opportunity to day she beat the ever living pants off the fat dude. He lost the minute they walked out because he was going to rebuff her by not shaking hands — and leaving her standing out in the middle of the floor in front of the podiums by herself.

She did not let him get away with that one — she chased him down and made him shake hands. In my view it was mainly all over for him but the shouting. He lost immediate control of the situation. Later he talked about eating dogs and she said at one point, that all he was going to talk about was immigration, even when it wasn't the question —- and what do you know.

She plainly stated she would have a presidency for the people and not for herself. As to good Insurance — Trump had concepts, she had ideas about how much better ACA could be. All he could do was insult and demean and degrade the U.S. and the Biden/Harris team. Also, as candidates, the Harris/Walz team. She wanted us together, he was espousing ways to make sure we went after each other. He was a total loser.

One more thing — Tonight Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris.

I could think of ore, but I'm too far over the moon right now. I'll get back to Earth sometime soon though.

I totally love you ladies! This is the first place I came to get debate feedback, (restless thru the night), and you did not disappoint! It’s wonderful to get your take on how things went, and then to further read the cherry on top news here of Taylor Swift’s impeccable timing endorsing Kamala Harris for President….well, that is the kind of news this thread delivers sometimes that is beyond satisfying!

I don’t even subscribe to the NYT, but when I googled Swift’s name, this article came up in full. I was able to read and copy the whole thing without it being blocked. So I guess the NYT is in a celebratory mood, too. Lol. And I see Taylor mentions Childless Cat Ladies, and and refers to herself as one so that group has got to be over the moon about it. I’m thrilled with her perfectly executed endorsement of Harris for maximum impact!

Her Instagram post backing the vice president came shortly after Ms. Harris and former President Donald Trump had stepped off the debate stage.

In her Instagram post with her pet cat, Taylor Swift said she would vote for Kamala Harris “because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”Credit...Instagram

Look what they made her do.

Taylor Swift, who is one of America’s most celebrated pop-culture icons and has an enormous following across the world, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris late Tuesday after Ms. Harris’s debate against former President Donald J. Trump.

The endorsement by Ms. Swift, delivered minutes after Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump had stepped off the debate stage in Philadelphia, offers Ms. Harris an unrivaled celebrity backer and a tremendous shot of adrenaline to her campaign, especially with the younger voters she has been trying to attract.

“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Ms. Swift wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them."

She signed her post as “Childless Cat Lady,” a reference to comments made by Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, about women without children. The photo that accompanied her post showed her holding a furry feline, Benjamin Button, her pet Ragdoll. Ms. Swift’s endorsement was much anticipated among Democrats. The singer has expressed regret for not having done more to speak out about her opposition to Mr. Trump during his first run in 2016. Since then, she has embraced a more political posture while speaking out on issues such as abortion access. But the precise timing of Tuesday’s endorsement was something of a surprise: Ms. Swift endorsed Joe Biden on Oct. 7, 2020, closer to the election.

The impact of Ms. Swift’s endorsement may be hard to quantify, but her ability to get supporters to register to vote came into sharp relief just last year. In a brief post on her Instagram account in 2023, Ms. Swift encouraged her 272 million supporters at the time to vote and included a link to the website Vote.org.

The site later reported 35,252 new registrations that day, a significant jump compared with the previous year, and an especially significant spike in a nonelection year.

On Tuesday, Ms. Swift included a similar link to Vote.gov in her Instagram story.

In her post endorsing Ms. Harris, Ms. Swift also referred to her “fears” about artificial intelligence. She pointed to content generated by the technology that had falsely suggested that she supported Mr. Trump, which the former president promoted on social media. She underscored concerns that Americans would not know where she genuinely stood if she had not spoken out.

“It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Ms. Swift wrote. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth."

Mr. Trump has called Ms. Swift “liberal” but “beautiful,” and he has praised a friend of hers, Brittany Mahomes, the wife of the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, as well. Some fans of Ms. Swift had encouraged her to go public about her support for Ms. Harris to make a point of contrast after it appeared that Ms. Mahomes had liked one of Mr. Trump’s social media posts.

Ms. Swift, who has been a star musician spanning country and pop music for almost two decades, is one of the few celebrities with broad appeal and the ability to cut through a crowded media environment. Her romance with Travis Kelce, the star tight end for the Chiefs, has captivated the worlds of football and culture, and she is in the final stages of a head-spinning international tour that has sold out stadiums around the globe.

The presidential election is 55 days away. Here’s our guide to the run-up to Election Day.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, dismissed the endorsement as “more evidence that the Democrat party has become the party of the wealthy elite.”

In 2020, Ms. Swift’s endorsement of Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris generated significant backlash from conservatives who urged her to keep her music career apolitical.

Four years later, her growing political involvement led to fevered speculation from Democrats about whether and when she would endorse Ms. Harris. Last month, some fans became convinced that she was signaling her endorsement by posting a photo of one of her backup dancers in silhouette that bore a resemblance to the vice president.

For her part, Ms. Harris has embraced pop music in her campaign.

Her rallies have had the feel of concerts as much as political events, with hip-hop stars like Megan Thee Stallion giving performances and D.J.s warming up dancing crowds of thousands before the vice president walks onstage to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom.” (Many Democrats had hoped that Beyoncé would perform at the party’s national convention in Chicago, but rumors of her presence turned out to be false.)

Mr. Biden’s rallies, in comparison, were small and low in energy, often reaching their peak of raucousness when a high school drum line played.

Polls show that Ms. Harris is doing much better with younger voters than Mr. Biden was, a crucial part of a resurgence in her polls that has allowed her to draw even with Mr. Trump. Ms. Swift’s backing of her campaign is a reflection of that appeal.

In making her endorsement, Ms. Swift added that she was “heartened and impressed” by Ms. Harris’s choice of Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, saying that Mr. Walz had been “standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”

Soon after, Mr. Walz appeared on MSNBC, where the host Rachel Maddow read Ms. Swift’s endorsement to him in its entirety.

“I am incredibly grateful, first of all, to Taylor Swift,” Mr. Walz said, putting his hand over his heart. “I say that also as a cat owner — a fellow cat owner.”

Ms. Swift has long pushed for her supporters to do their civic duty, posting a picture of herself in a long line on Election Day in 2016, a photo her fans thought was a cryptic endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

It was not until 2018 that Ms. Swift made her first formal foray into politics by endorsing a Democrat, Phil Bredesen, over a Republican, Marsha Blackburn, in a Tennessee Senate race. (Nashville is the nation’s country music capital, and Ms. Swift maintains a residence there.)

Ms. Blackburn won the race by more than 10 percentage points in the deep red state.

In an interview with Vogue in 2019, Ms. Swift indicated that she had wanted to be more vocal about supporting Mrs. Clinton but had worried that her support could backfire. She said she had feared that Mr. Trump might try “weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement” against her and Mrs. Clinton. Ms. Swift also shared concerns that public criticism of her at the time would be unfairly applied to Ms. Clinton as well.

Ms. Swift continued: “The summer before that election, all people were saying was, ‘She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar.’ These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability?”

The former president spent much of the debate staring forward, while Harris eyed him quizzically and occasionally spoke directly into the camera.

Sept. 10, 2024 NBC

It began just as they appeared before the audience.

Vice President Kamala Harris walked across the stage into former President Donald Trump's space, reached out her hand and introduced herself. 

Trump, visibly taken aback, shook her hand. 

The assertive move by Harris was one that ended up setting the tone for the next 90 minutes, where Harris made her case to become the nation's next president as much through body language as she did through words. 

And in that period, she repeatedly got under Trump's skin, sending him into angry screeds where he struggled to stay on topic and, at times, careened into confounding anecdotes.

“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said, referencing a baseless claim about Haitian immigrants in an answer about immigration. “This is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

Trump spent much of the night leaning forward, hands on the lectern, brooding. He would not look at Harris, even when making an emphatic point about her, instead pointing his finger over at his Democratic opponent without turning his head. 

It was one of the most tangible signs that Trump grew unnerved in their first debate, which started with Trump talking on point about one of his key campaign themes: the economy.

Harris at times tilted or shook her head in disbelief, smiled incredulously and at one point looked right at Trump, putting her hand to her chin in an exaggerated gesture as though to convey she was listening to a tall tale. Her expression turned into an instant meme on social media.

As Trump boasted about how he won the 2020 election and had garnered more votes than any other candidate, Harris responded that he had lost — and been fired by 81 million people. 

“Clearly, he’s having a very difficult time processing that,” she said.

Overall, Harris' performance was a dramatic shift from what Democrats saw from President Joe Biden in the June debate, which was roundly panned as a disaster for him and set into motion a party revolt that saw Biden drop out of the 2024 election. Then, Biden looked off-camera repeatedly, appearing lost at times and sometimes struggling to complete a sentence.

It appeared Harris learned from that debate: that the cameras are always on and body language was a critical way to communicate with the audience. Harris' decision to initiate the handshake, moving toward Trump, came after she, like other Democrats, had watched Trump use his physical heft in a 2016 debate against Hillary Clinton to project dominance. 

On several other occasions, Harris made a point to look directly at the camera while delivering her answers. It was her attempt to try to emphasize the message that Trump is in for it for himself and she sought to turn the page. 

But Trump also began delivering circuitous answers — and growing visibly agitated. That included when Harris chided Trump, saying world leaders were laughing at him and America, for ever taking him seriously. Trump then announced he had the backing of Hungarian strongman Victor Orban.

Even some Republicans, at the debate's conclusion, lamented Trump's performance. One Republican donor called him “wild, uncontrolled” and declared that Harris was adept at “pushing his buttons." 

“Trump is so angry he can’t clearly get his message across," a Trump fundraiser said. "She’s cool, calm and able to provoke him. I was stressing hearing it. On the other hand, everyone watching are stressed and angry. Maybe they very well identify with Trump’s anger.” 

A Republican operative gave a more nuanced answer, saying Harris had not given clear answers herself.

“He is taking her bait — which is a missed opportunity but she’s not giving answers to lower prices and securing the border,” the person said. 

Another Republican though, said Harris' expressions may have turned off some voters. 

“Trump was strong and measured for the first 30 minutes. He let the moderators fact checking get under his skin for the next 30 minutes," the person said. "And then came back strong after the commercial break. Kamala’s facial reactions in the split screen have been off-putting.”

Trump also complained about the size of Harris' rallies, accusing her without evidence of paying people to attend. 

At one point, Trump did glance over when Harris attempted to speak into her microphone that was muted.

"I'm talking now," Trump said, in a reference to what Harris said to then-Vice President Mike Pence in the 2020 election. "Does that sound familiar?"

One Democrat who had been critical of Biden's debate performance had a drastically different view of Harris'.

• "Kamala Harris may be delivering the best performance by a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton. Never seen Trump backpedal like this," said Democratic strategist Pete Giangreco. "That was a flat out a-- whipping."

Latest Harris campaign ad

Thank you Divine for the entries copied and pasted. I seem to have lots of trouble on doing mine. I have to say it was a phenomenal night. As to FG's make-over, while it was surprising on the one hand, it was indeed a bit startling on the other. I wondered who had taken him in hand because while I didn't care for it much, I would have to say it was a lot more flattering than how he usually appears. Also losing the deep splotchy orange was a definite improvement as well.

They were not able to do much about his diseased mind. The fact that he was (while clearly rated as loser) given 37 % is something of a miracle to me. Someone was kind and even I have to admit it is less of a 'gloat' if you give enough points to make sure it doesn't seem to be the blow-out I saw going on.

That said, I did think (before I actually heard some of the pundits say it on tv) that V.P. Harris REFUSING to be made small by being left alone in front of the podiums, and physically accosting FG and insisting on introducing herself and getting a handshake put her firmly in control of the surroundings from the get-go. All downhill after that.

Even Lindsay Graham (sp) had to admit the night was a disaster for FG and that the FG prep team should be immediately fired. I'll say. First decent assessment Lindsay has made in a while.

I'm sure a lot of the difference was that some people have such exalted views of themselves that they have to have things like debate preps handled delicately. Others like Harris (no matter how brilliant a prosecutor) listens to those who are to prep her and takes it to heart as the assistance it is meant to be.

I understand that people still have some questions about V.P. Harris, but one of the women interviewed by Jake Soboroff, still felt she might not vote the presidential part of the ticket. I have to hope she does a lot more research. A lot of those people (were there seven or so ) knew or got convinced that it likely they shouldn't vote for FG, but they held back saying they'd go for Harris. Not sure what to make of that. I sort of felt like they showed reluctance before the debate upon their original interviews and it seemed to me that they felt a bit timid about giving Harris a thumbs-up afterwards — as if they had too many questions. While I can understand a lot of it, I was surprised that they couldn't acknowledge that she was clearly for them while FG was only for himself. So terribly lop-sided.

Sort of already wondering how long this dissection of the debate will go on and how much cred the Reps. will try to claim with the horrid, disgusting, display FG gave them to digest. They were worried about what would happen, but in retrospect, there are plenty hoping FG goes up in flames — which Divine's meme clearly shows. He should be crispier than last weeks cinder. As an aside, the first several years of my life my family heated with coal. When the coal had burned down what you had left was called 'clinkers'. FG is the worlds biggest 'clinker' right now and 'clinker' he will stay.

Obviously they took cues from the prudential Biden debate with FG and not one moment of fact-checking from the CNN people. Yeah for ABC and their team.

Fun.