Tuesday's presidential debate drew millions of viewers as election season heats up.
To get an idea of how well the debate went and Michigan’s role in the race, WKAR’s Melorie Begay spoke with NPR National Political Reporter Don Gonyea to learn more.
Gonyea will be speaking at a public event at 7:15pm, Thursday in the WKAR studios on the campus of MSU. You can reserve a spot here.
Full Transcript:
Melorie Begay: Okay, Don, let's start with the presidential debate. What are your initial takeaways?
Don Gonyea: First Vice President Harris did largely what she wanted to do, introduce herself to the American people, many of whom are still trying to figure out who she is. She's been vice president, but that's not exactly the highest visibility position in the government.
So I do think that she introduced herself to a lot of Americans last night in ways that they really haven't seen her before. And I think they saw in her a former prosecutor, certainly, who really took those prosecutorial skills to former President Trump and someone who who had a mission, which I think she largely accomplished in the debate.
A lot has been written that it was not former President Trump's best night. He often seemed to can be unfocused in his answers, and he was certainly feeling under attack by Vice President Harris.
A And I think if you just kind of look at the instant polling that came in afterward, generally speaking, the viewing public gave her high marks and him lower marks.
Begay: Now you weren't physically at the debate. You weren't covering it in person, but you've covered quite a few debates over your career. Was there anything that you thought was particularly interesting about this one?
Gonyea: First and foremost, just kind of the dynamic of the debate was fascinating. But beyond that, I thought it was interesting watching and listening to NPR’s post-debate coverage that that Trump showed up in the Spin Room after the debate.
The Spin Room, of course, the room where reporters are talking to surrogates who are there to put their particular candidate’s spin on the debate and to put it in context. It's just a place to talk to a lot of different people associated with the various campaigns.
But the fact that Donald Trump showed up in a general election Spin Room was very unusual. To me, it said that he felt the need to spin his own performance, and, you know, get a little extra time in front of the cameras, and that he indeed may have been concerned about his performance.
Now he didn't acknowledge any of that, and he basically went to the spin room and told people both how well he did and how unfair he was treated by the moderators from ABC News. But his mere presence there was very unusual.
Begay: As you mentioned, this is going to be a really close race. I'm curious. How do you think Michigan fits into that this fall?
Gonyea: There are just a small handful of states that everybody is looking at. Michigan is certainly one of them. It's one of the bigger ones, Pennsylvania, certainly Georgia, Arizona, and others on that list, but those are, those are the biggest battleground states.
Michigan went for Donald Trump just barely something like 10,000 votes in 2016. Joe Biden and the Democrats carried it four years later by a larger margin, about 150,000 votes or so, but it's gone back and forth just in the past two elections, both of which had Donald Trump on the ballot. There's no reason to think it won't be close again.
And if anybody has any interest in seeing a candidate…there are probably too many ads for television but the next seven weeks are going to be very intense here.
