With myself as well. No, im in a lovely cafe in Downtown Doylestown in pennsylvania, in bucks county, pennsylvania. I dont know if youve been to doylestown. It is beautiful. You should definitely come here. Caitriona, youre in a library or a fake library . Im in a fake library. Yeah. No, its not. I mean, full disclosure, any library you see on television these days is fake. Lets be honest. I dont think theres a librarian on the planet that would let me speak this loudly if i were in a library, but i am in the Library Corner of the bbc washington bureau, so i have nipped into the Library Corner to have this chat with you guys, because it is very busy in this bbc bureau. Weve had a lot of reinforcements come into town for the debate this week. Of course, its been another crazy busy week and a crazy busy month and a crazy busy year, but im delighted that us three are going to find the time every week to just get together and have a chat about what weve noticed from the campaigns, whats impacting voters ahead, of course, of the three of us being together in studio on the big night, election Results Night in november, and a few days have passed since that big debate now, i think people have had a chance to come up for Air And Kind of think about what happened, moving away from the sort of dizzy enthusiasm that we saw in the Spin Room that night. You know, it was a night of claims and counterclaims, studying of body language, stories about eating cats, Cat Lady endorsements. But ive been really wondering and trying to investigate how much this impacts voters and how much attention people actually pay to it. I mean, we Hearfrom Abc. Thats the big question. Isnt it . I mean, we Hearfrom Abc news, 61 Million people tuned in to watch this, about 10 Million more than watched Trump And Biden injune. But what we got was kind of same old, same old Donald Trump, and we got Kamala Harris trying to shift the focus onto him. So all those polls we saw in advance that people wanted to hear from her, learn more about her and what she stood for, she was very successful, i think, in deflecting the attention onto him. I mean, she laid those traps that he walked into, talking about his crowd size, his vote size, the size of his wealth, and so on. But she didnt answer some of the key questions that people had. The first question she got on the night being potentially the most important, when she was asked, did she think the american people were better off now or were better off four years ago, which is the question that Donald Trump and all the republicans keep hammering heron. And she didnt actually give an answer for that. She didnt have an answer prepared for that. She didnt give too many specifics either. Now, maybe the strategy was to try and keep the focus on Donald Trump. And i was speaking to a high level democratic strategist about this, and he had a really interesting takeaway, which was that he felt at the end of that debate, they had succeeded in making Donald Trump look like an old person who wasnt in command of their thoughts, who was rambling and easily distracted. He certainly looked like an old cross person. Which were, you know, the old was the thing that people were saying about Joe Biden and that they were kind of, they were happy that they had shifted that onto Donald Trump that night, and that they were very happy with how the whole thing went. But i dont know. I mean, we wont know for another week or so if its had any shift on the polls. But nothing has shifted Donald Trumps performance for about a year. Hes been coming in, you know, between 48 and 50 , no matter what has happened to him, including that assassination attempt. So i dont know. Do you guys think, will this make any difference . Well, ill tell you that ive been speaking to some voters here in bucks county, pennsylvania, where i am, specifically about the debate, because i was curious, you know, how did this actually go down with voters . So its just anecdotal, what i can tell you from here. But really interesting that every person that ive spoken to here about the debates, is that they all say that they were disappointed by the performance of both candidates onstage because they feel like Policy Issues were not actually addressed. They feel like. One man described it to me like two kids playing in a Sandbox Orfighting in a sandbox, and that they werent actually focused on answering the questions that matter to people. And specifically, weve been talking a lot to Small Business owners, and theyre so frustrated about inflation, rising costs, and they feel like neither candidate has actually presented a plan and explained how they would implement that plan to bring down some of these costs. So again, this is anecdotal here, but, you know, interesting to note that. Several times, she mentioned specifically Small Businesses. She did. Yeah. That was like, to the extent that she mentioned an economic plan and she didnt really talk about what that plan would be. But she made a point of talking about Small Business owners. And the 50,000 grant that she was going to give to Small Business owners. But its interesting, when you mention housing to me, because that was something that struck me at the debate she said, i have a housing policy. Full stop, move on. There was no detail on what is the housing policy, and that is something that everyone in this country is concerned about, whether its access to housing, whether its rent, whether its mortgages, whatever form it is, it really matters to people. They need a roof over their heads. And thats the kind of thing that voters vote on, isnt it, when they go into the polls . I think that, you know, its. I mean, after the kind of, sort of giddy euphoria of the night, of democrats being so happy that Kamala Harris had not performed badly, which i think everyone can agree. She didnt perform badly. She probably exceeded expectations. Certainly, she exceeded the performance ofJoe Biden back in june. Um, im struck by how many messages ive got from kind of democratic strategists and how many conversations ive had, you know, i spoke to david plouffe, who ran barack obamas 2008 campaign. I spoke tojim messina, who ran barack obamas successful 2012 campaign this week. And several democrats have come. Just in the last even 2a hours, im looking at a text that ive just got from somebody this afternoon saying, same swing states, same undecided voters, same lack of clarity. Theres been this kind of slight chill has set in now. Maybe democrats are very nervous about being too exuberant and they see the polls, but it is striking, the degree to which people are asking the questions. Im assuming, to the extent that, you know, youve been talking to voters, i think theres a realisation that she gave a good performance. But will that. I mean, some people are saying these Set Pieces dont make any difference when it comes to the polls. Will that actually change any minds . And i think that seems to be the key question. It sounds like youre both hearing the same thing that ive been hearing that, yes, it was a good performance, but was it enough to persuade people that she had the policies to bring down the price of goods . I had a few republicans say to me as well, very privately, they were prepared to admit that it wasnt a great night for Donald Trump, which, of course, is not what theyre all saying publicly. But they said to that exact point, it doesnt matter, because he was classic trump. You know, he delivered that Maga Megamix of classic hit lines about how the democrats, the Biden Harris Campaign have destroyed the economy, how the borders are being flooded by immigrants, how other countries are emptying their prisons and theirjails and their asylum institutions, and all of this stuff that Donald Trump says at every rally, of which there is absolutely zero evidence of that happening, we have to say. But he delivered all of those lines. So if youre a Donald Trump supporter and youre watching that, or even if youre not, thats what youre expecting to hear from him. Yeah, definitely. And just in the Spin Room, you know, we were at the debate in philadelphia and talked to a bunch of lawmakers and surrogates and members of the campaign teams. And of course, its a Spin Room, so you have both sides claiming that they won the debate, of course. But i thought it was so interesting. Including Donald Trump. Including Donald Trump, who was just actually two booths down at fox news. And so we could barely hear or do anything because of the massive scrum that gathered around him, which is usually the case. But, you know, it was so interesting that you heard some of the surrogates for Donald Trump, like Congressman Byron donalds from florida, who came down to sit with us and talk to us right after the debate, who said, listen, we very clearly are ahead on these issues, on the economy, on crime, On Immigration. And yet when he was making those points, he was able to prosecute that case better than Donald Trump did during the debate itself. And Kamala Harriss surrogates and some of the lawmakers we spoke to, like Veronica Escobar of texas, a congresswoman, she was saying, look, you know, we know that voters might not know what Kamala Harriss plan is On Immigration yet, but we do believe that voters will trust us, because they see this performance and they see that shes in command. Again, you know, well have to see whether it actually has any sort of impact. But interesting to see that the Harris Team on the ground and her supporters as well really were taking so much away from being confident, at least that night, the first night, right after the debate had concluded, by the fact that she had performed better than expected, to your point, caitriona. So i had a very interesting conversation. I mentioned david plouffe, who was the kind of guru of barack obamas 2008 campaign in the way that kind of Alan Greenspan was called the oracle of the economy when he was chairman of the federal reserve. David plouffe was kind of heralded as this person who can perform miracles when it comes to democratic politics. And certainly, 2008 was a very successful democratic campaign. And i asked him this question that weve been posing about whether it makes any difference and if so, specifically, which groups of the electorate he felt might have been targeted by this debate performance. And i thought it was interesting the way he kind of broke it down to me in three separate groups of people. And now, he is a Senior Adviser to Kamala Harris and hes working on her campaign, so this comes from that perspective. But the way theyre kind of Micro Targeting is kind of worth perhaps framing it. And one is that he felt that there are a lot of voters who want to learn more about her, who dont know much about her voters of all different ages, and he thinks thats somewhere between 4 and 8 of the voting population, and he felt that they will have got confidence from her performance on the Debate Stage because she looked like she belonged there, was how he phrased it. She, you know, she looked this phrase she looked like a commander in chief. She looked confident. She kind of owned the stage. She didnt look like she was apologising for being there. She didnt look nervous. Maybe at the beginning, id say the first 5 to 10 minutes, she did look a bit nervous, but he felt that they would have been reassured. So thats one group. Another group, the second group that he spoke about, were people who arent sure whether theyre going to vote at all, and who he felt would have been energised by that debate performance. And i suppose that speaks to the fact that 60 Million people tuned into it, which is, you know, it is a sizeable chunk of the american electorate, and that they will have seen a high Energy Performance from her and that that might motivate them, if theyve been sitting on the fence, to feel this is something worth going to the polls for. And then the third group of people that they were trying to target, the people who were leaning towards Donald Trump but dont like his character. And im sure youve both heard this out on the campaign trail. Ive heard it a lot. People who say, well, i dont really like the things he represents, i dont like the way he talks about women, i dont like some of the kind of antics, i dont like his twitterfeed, but i like his policies. And he felt that some of those people may have been a little demoralised by what they saw onstage, by Donald Trumps performance, by the fact that he came across, as you said earlier, as kind of old, which was a strategy of the Harris Campaign, was to use that word, old. It was like a Drinking Game after a bit, you know, every time she said old story, you could take another shot. And the other thing i think thats interesting that ive heard from the Harris Campaign is that they are super conscious that this is an election thats going to be won on the margins. So even if in each of those three different groups of people, which i think are probably broadly what have been known, rather dismissively, i think sometimes, as low information voters, or people who make up their mind late, you only need to peel away a few of them, right . You only need to peel away A Thousand or two, potentially in the swing states, you know, 5,000 in georgia or 5,000 in arizona, and you can start having an impact on the outcome of the race. I just thought it was an interesting. From someone whos such a Master Strategist in terms of they went into this debate with very clear people they wanted to reach, and that was how they felt they were going to reach them. Yeah, i think its quite clever of them in a way, because those people youve described, those sort of low propensity voters, they do tend to vote. Much nicer than low information. Yeah. They do tend to vote for Donald Trump. And theyre really hard to capture in polls because theyre not engaged in sort of the daily day political cut and thrust, as we. Many of them are kind of, you know, women who have kids and are getting them to school and they have jobs. They have a life. Super busy. They have a life to do. They have shift working to do. They have all of that family stuff. But they do tend to vote for Donald Trump. So it shows just how concerned they are about those marginal voters that theyre trying to target those people at this remove. And i think the other point thats worth noting is were about to start mail in balloting, right . Alabama has already sent out its postal votes. They have to go out to all the states within the next 10 or 11 days. So there are people, thats going to be, you know, an issue. They can cast their vote now, seal the envelope and get it off and they dont need to worry about, are they going to have to get the earlier bus on Election Day to get to their ballot centre, or will they have to swap shifts with somebody else and all of that . I mean, thats the other really interesting conversation i had this week is, i met deborah mattinson, who is a british pollster who was advising Keir Starmer in his very successful election this summer on how to win back voters, specifically in the north of england, who had drifted towards the Conservative Party and to get them back into the labour fold, and its the kind of, in britain its known as the red wall, in america we would call it the blue wall. And she has been doing a string of Focus Groups and advising, helping the Harris Campaign with this issue of how to recapture voters they feel, working, basically Working Class voters in the blue wall. And the key thing that she said to me, and i spoke to her before the debate and after the debate, and before the debate, she said, the main thing for all of these voters is, the single biggest thing is affordability and the second biggest thing is immigration, and that she described in Herfocus Group people who have been going around Grocery S