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When I was in the polling business many years ago, our reports always started with the mood of the electorate, whether things were moving in the right direction or seriously off on the wrong track, then moved to two sections on character and issues.
Usually those sections were pretty balanced. We advised candidates on which character traits and issue stands worked for them and which did not. We suggested how they could emphasize their strengths and address or pivot away from their weaknesses.
However, there's not much need for such a balanced approach in this presidential election, or about the candidates' first and possibly only television debate, the one on ABC News on Sept. 10. With only minor exceptions, character traits work for Vice President Kamala Harris. And with only minor exceptions, issue stands work for former President Donald Trump.
So the obvious debate strategy for Trump would have been to hammer home his advantages on issues, starting with two issues on which voters give dismal grades to the Biden-Harris administration, then going on to the raft of issues on which Harris, in her previous campaign for president, took stands widely unpopular during this one.
From time to time, and succinctly in his closing statement, Trump did this. But he also went off on alarums and excursions, which, however entertaining for his rally audiences, seemed distracting or puzzling for the moveable voters whose votes he needs.
He took up valuable time, for example, trying to insist that no one has been leaving his rallies early. He cited Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a controversial figure for those who follow these things and unknown to most others, as a supportive leader. He engaged in an extended debate over whether he really lost the 2020 election.
As Fox News' Brit Hume noted, Harris "baited him successfully, which is the story of the debate in my view." Such diversions point to character weaknesses: an unwillingness to focus, a preoccupation with personal slights, and a lack of discipline. In contrast, Harris was clearly well prepared and disciplined in reciting favorably worded phrases.
"We're not going back," Harris said at one point. "It's time to turn the page." That's absurd from one point of view. Nothing she said indicated that a Harris-Walz administration's policies would be much different from the Biden-Harris administration's. But her words do point to what a majority of voters have found troubling about Trump's character.
Harris benefited as well from the ABC moderators' erroneous fact-checking when they argued that no one favors ninth-month abortions, that the Springfield city manager must be a conclusive source of events there, and that violent crime rates declined sharply in 2021 and 2022.
But media partiality to Democrats is just one of several asymmetrical factors in politics. It's more enduring than the Republicans' Electoral College edge in 2016 and 2020, for Democrats had an edge there in 2004 and 2012. But a disciplined Republican candidate should expect media bias and should be prepared with brief and persuasive ripostes. Trump wasn't.