What's More Important to Undecided Voters: Policy or Personality?

Don't underestimate the power of likability -- and dislikability too.

I have this funny feeling that, before the election is over, personality will triumph over policy, at least for those voters who were still undecided before watching last Tuesday’s debate.

Yes, inflation still matters and voters still care about illegal immigration and crime, but they also care about how they feel about a candidate — whether or not they like the candidate.

Donald Trump came off as angry, unfocused and unprepared at the debate. Personality wasn’t his strong suit. It rarely is.

His MAGA base likes him. Almost nobody else does.

Kamala Harris may have said things that aren’t true. She did. More than once. She may have deflected questions in order to pivot to rehearsed talking points. Again, more than once. But, as a headline over a New York Times op-ed put it, “Trump looked livid. Harris looked amused. It was no contest.”

Right on all counts. I’m not sure if Harris beat Trump or Trump lost all by himself. It doesn’t matter. One way or the other, she won and he lost — despite what he thinks.

Voters who supported Trump before the debate, I’m confident, still support him today. Same with Harris’s supporters. But for those who were still trying to make up their minds, the key question was: Could they see her in the Oval Office? And the answer after 90 minutes on live TV, I think, is … yes.

There were no word salads, no mumbling and stumbling. Trump set a low bar for her and she made it easily over the top. She came off as competent, whether or not you agreed with what she was saying.

From an editorial in the Wall Street Journal: “She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched.”

What was not untouched was Trump’s assertion that in Ohio, immigrants were eating other people’s pets. “They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in — they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” How does he know? Unfounded rumors about it made their way to social media — and Donald figured, if they’re on social media, they must be true.

Harris laughed off the story and didn’t bother responding with something like, “Donald, people will think you’re crazy if you keep talking like that.” But it’s what I thought sitting at home watching on TV. And I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one.

Trump has a bad habit of looking through the rearview mirror and thinking he’s looking straight ahead. So he went back to his favorite oldies about how the last election was stolen, about how the rioters on Jan. 6 were treated badly and about how some 60 courts ruled against him in 2020 on a “technicality.”

The man cannot utter a declarative sentence that simply says, “I lost.” It’s as if he’s afraid of what would happen to everything he believes about himself if he just admitted the obvious. I’ll leave the question of what’s going on inside Trump’s head to people who study personality disorders.

But in the meantime, here’s a question to consider: Does any undecided voter who goes shopping for food for the family care about any of Trump’s grievances? I don’t think they do. 

With all her faults — and she has more than a few — Harris at least prepared for the debate. Trump didn’t. He never does. Such is his confidence in himself. If he prepares, it means he doesn’t already know everything he needs to know. More fodder for those who study personality disorders.

And did Harris get some help from the ABC moderators who fact-checked Trump about five times while fact-checking Harris zero times? Yes, but the moderators didn’t bring Trump down.  He did that all by himself.

And so, in the end there are only a few lingering questions that matter. One is, will Trump’s dismal performance hurt him on Election Day? Hard to say because, by now, just about everybody knows how Trump behaves in public. So I’m not sure anything he said or did will matter enough to sway the election.

Here’s the same question with a different emphasis: Can Kamala Harris — who not that long ago was held in low regard and considered a political liability — actually beat Donald Trump?

After the debate, the answer, I think, is a clear yes.

In just about every poll, Trump beats Harris on almost every major issue voters say they care about.

That matters — but only if policy counts more than personality. This time around — as in 2020, when he lost — I’m betting that personality just might win out. Trump’s personality — which, once you go beyond his base, is not a plus for him.

And that means that when all the votes are counted, 2024 may look a lot like 2020.

And that’s when it will be, in Yogi Berra’s immortal words, deja vu all over again.

Because the only thing we can be sure of is that if Trump loses, we’ll hear all about how the election was rigged.

That’s one more for the folks who study personality disorders.