Somewhere close to half of all American voters probably watched some or all of the first 2016 presidential candidates debate on Monday between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This was, as more than one commentator has noted, right up there, close to Superbowl viewing territory. And that is saying something in a world of innumerable entertainment and news choices.

If the debate had been just 30 minutes long, many reasonable people might well have concluded that the two candidates, surprisingly, were fairly evenly matched and that, further, Donald Trump had surpassed at least one hurdle – he looked and sounded plausibly like a presidential candidate, or even a president. That was when the two candidates were sparring over which candidate’s economic plans were better for what ails the state of the American economy. There is obviously room for honest debate on the subject, of course.

But then that Trump was replaced by that other Trump we have come to know and love, or hate – the rude, arrogant, braggadocious, outrageously self-aware, mocking, name-calling, conspiratorial, misogynistic, racially insensitive, red-meat-throwing, dog-whistling, nit-picking one. And that Trump seemed fatally unable to control his facial grimaces. He gulped water like a man who had been trapped for days in the Kalahari, gripped the podium like a man in the throes of an inner ear disorder, and who later rose (or sank) to the level of blaming the moderator and the microphone for his misfortunes on Monday.

By the next morning, Donald Trump was relitigating his misogyny in the print and social media, as well as on television talk shows, but in terms of how he was justified in picking on talk show host/actress Rosie O’Donnell and the former Miss Universe winner from Venezuela for her supposed body mass as well as her ethnicity (Trump had been a part-owner of the contest at the time). Alicia Machado, the woman in question, had, in the years since, become a US citizen and, after Trump’s attacks on her, she took umbrage at this on television. Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton’s people helpfully arranged for the maligned Alicia Machado to make her case. In response to all this Trumpian conspiracy theory-spinning about a biased Google, faulty microphones and a sneakily partisan moderator, Clinton piled on with a beatific smile, saying that when you blame the set, you are in real trouble.

Clinton, of course, had laid several traps during the debate itself. These included effectively getting Trump to confess he didn’t pay federal income taxes (or, at best, virtually none), that such behaviour was the right thing to do as a smart businessman, and that his stiffing of subcontractors during the construction of one of his buildings was simply good, sharp business practice whenever the subcontractors couldn’t bring to bear sufficiently bloodthirsty lawyers themselves. None of that was emblematic of the kind of debate tradition expected of serious adults vying to occupy the most powerful office on the planet.

Still, despite this televised silliness (and an internationally embarrassing silliness it was, to boot), and as something clearly unworthy of a political debate tradition that reaches back to the 1858 face-offs between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas over an Illinois senate seat, it remains unclear, precisely, what effect this appalling performance by Trump (skilfully aided and abetted by his competitor) will have on the dynamics of the presidential race itself. Serious polling data that reflects all this will be available later this week, most likely.

University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato, one of the top elections analysts in the nation, argued just after the debate, in his newsletter:

“It is dangerous to offer confident predictions of how the public will react to a debate immediately after it is concluded. The instant polls you may see (or may have already seen) after the debate declaring one of the candidates the winner may or may not be meaningful, and in order to fully assess the impact we’re probably going have to wait until the end of the week, when new national and state polls will assess how the two candidates’ performances changed the race. It’s no fun to urge patience – but we think that’s better than making sweeping pronouncements in the aftermath of a widely-watched national event that voters may interpret quite differently than experts may expect.

“The pundit consensus seems to be that Hillary Clinton ‘won’, but we all know how many times Donald Trump has been counted out, only for him to endure. We also know that Clinton and Trump are talking to two very different countries, and political analysts and reporters are generally in the country Clinton, not Trump, inhabits. However, Trump faces many questions about his qualifications for the job and his temperament, and we don’t believe he did much to provide satisfactory answers to those concerns. Perhaps enough voters want change so much that they are willing to overlook their reservations.

“Keep in mind that people can judge X as the debating winner, yet stick with candidate Y. Most people tune into debates to cheer for their side; win or lose, they’ve made their choice. According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only about 11% of those watching were ‘debate persuadables’ – voters who might really switch sides (perhaps from a third-party contender to Clinton or Trump). We’d bet even most of that group will end up where their partisan identification leads them naturally.

“Before the debate, there was much reporting about Clinton’s preparation versus Trump’s – Clinton spent much more time on it while Trump stayed out on the trail. Trump’s lack of preparation showed, and here’s an example: During a discussion on cybersecurity, Trump failed to bring up Clinton’s use of private e-mails as a potential cybersecurity issue. That was the equivalent of ‘missing the biggest, easiest softball lobbed right down the heart of the plate’, as our Twitter pal @EsotericCD put it.”

Beyond all of these qualifications, there is the possibility some viewers may have felt they had fulfilled their citizenship obligations by staying with the debate for the first half hour or so, and then slipped away to do other things, or perhaps to chat on social media in support of their candidate, rather than actually watch the debate itself unfold. Such people may well have found their preconceptions about Donald Trump largely fulfilled in those initial minutes.

They would have observed that Trump was an especially sharp, even thoughtful, businessman – just as advertised – who was going to crack the whip on those sleazy international competitors America must always confront (and those unpatriotic American companies in cahoots with them), and that he would kick-start or take a cattle prod and a Taser to the economy and its constituent parts in order to up its game. Oh, and he never mentioned (or even really hinted at) his anti-Muslim shtick, or his Mexican wall either, in any of that discussion. It was all just the lousy American tax code and the unreasonable use by countries of the global trading system and currency manipulation. “Hmm”, you could almost hear people heretofore hesitant to lean towards him say to their families and friends, “maybe he’s pretty reasonable after all.”

Still, the pundit class, and even Republican-leaning ones, as well as the GOP strategic camp, have weighed in that Donald Trump was well and truly whipped in Monday’s debate. Even some furious spin isn’t going to get the GOP out of that mess, such pronouncements would argue.

The Arizona Republic, a newspaper that had never endorsed a Democrat in its 126-year history, showed up the other day with:

“In a nation with an increasingly diverse population, Trump offers a recipe for permanent civil discord. In a global economy, he offers protectionism and a false promise to bring back jobs that no longer exist. America needs to look ahead and build a new era of prosperity for the working class. This is Hillary Clinton’s opportunity. She can reach out to those who feel left behind. She can make it clear that America sees them and will address their concerns. She can move us beyond rancour and incivility. The Arizona Republic endorses Hillary Clinton for president.”

Whoa. Now even the Republican Party’s elder statesmen are weighing in with a devastating critique of their own party’s presidential candidate.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank quoted John Warner (the former senator, secretary of the navy and two-war veteran, as well as one-time husband of Elizabeth Taylor) saying of the debate he had just watched:

“‘Candidate Clinton maintained [her] composure throughout the debate; the other candidate, in my judgement, did not. She was firm but fair and, underline, respectful. That’s one word that’s totally lacking on the other side of this ticket.’ Warner hailed Kaine, a longtime friend, as a ‘beautiful man’ of ‘unquestioned integrity’.

“And Warner was diligent. ‘We are, like it or not, the leader of the free world,’ he said, and the president must ‘have a very firm and fundamental understanding’ about America’s role and responsibility. ‘You don’t pull up a quick text like National Security for Dummies,’ he said. Presidents ‘have got to understand there are times they don’t know everything, but they can learn, and particularly they can learn if they’ve got a foundation of their own experience to build upon — not go out and try to create it out of whole cloth after you read two or three brief sheets. Ridiculous.’ ”

Warner’s noting Tim Kaine, senator from Virginia and Hillary Clinton’s running mate, is significant here. And that is because the next debate will pit Kaine against Trump’s running buddy, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, on Tuesday October 4. This time around it will take place at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, moderated by Elaine Quijano, CBSN news anchor and CBS News correspondent. (There are two more presidential candidate debates, on October 9 in St Louis and then on October 19 in Reno, Nevada.)

The point here is that for the Democrats, it is now up to Tim Kaine to hammer home this advantage, showing that the Clinton-Kaine message on the economy and foreign policy is cogent, coherent, and sensible, and that their proposed policies fit well within the broad, historical American consensus. And that, moreover, it is a message that is inclusive of the entire nation, without any dissing of its constituent parts, regions or ethnicities. A second part of the Kaine agenda is to continue to pursue the misstatements and elasticity with the truth that is emblematic of the Trump message as shown in his performance on Monday, and in all his subsequent spin about it. Finally, Kaine’s task is to find the places where Trump’s message visibly conflicts with Republican orthodoxy – especially on trade and economic growth – as exemplified by people just like Mike Pence. Pence, after all, has a long record from his time in Congress, standing four-square for free trade and support of international trade treaties – something rather different than the views of the man he is now joined to at the hip in this presidential campaign.

The tasks for Mike Pence, in turn, are to batter back with all those messy corrections and clarifications regarding the Trumpean message to date, and to try to carry the attack over to Clinton’s own possible difficulties, such as her apparent free trade orthodoxy that was on display until earlier this year, or her record as secretary of state in a difficult and dangerous world that is filled with all those unchecked terrorists that she, personally, failed to wrestle to the ground by herself while Secretary of State. And it will also be to set the stage for (or amplify upon) Trump’s own threatened deployment of the Clinton “character issue” – as in why didn’t she defend those poor women maligned or maltreated by her husband during his wild and crazy years. Maybe it will be best to get out your wading boots, if you plan to watch the next debate and the run-up to it via social media and in forthcoming campaign speeches. DM

Photo: [L] Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump (L) embraces Indiana Governor and Republican Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence (R) during the third day of the 2016 Republican National Convention at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, 20 July 2016. EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS [R] Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (R) and Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee Tim Kaine (L) on stage after accepting the nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate at the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention held at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 28 July 2016. EPA/SHAWN THEW