By Nasai Rivas
Immigration has become the center of political discourse since last week’s presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
During the Sept. 10 debate, Trump said Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets despite there being no credible evidence to that claim, according to a spokesperson for the city and the Springfield Police Department.
On Sept. 13, at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course, Trump claimed Harris settled 200,000 Haitian immigrants in the United States, according to a report by the Current.
Trump’s allegations are focused on the fears and hatred in voters, said Jason Whitehead, an associate professor of political science at Long Beach State.
“When you tell stories that hit people at a visceral level, at a level that’s beneath their rationality, that kind of gets down to a level of their fears and their hatred,” Whitehead said.
Whitehead, a CSULB graduate, was a judicial clerk in Oregon and a staff attorney for the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles before getting his doctorate in political science from the University of Southern California. He then returned to CSULB as an associate professor in 2007.
The Long Beach Current spoke with Whitehead about other issues and policies that were topics during the debate.
Q: How do you think Trump and Harris did to capture college voters?
A: Not great honestly, because college voters care about the number one issue on college voters’ minds these days…Israel-Palestine. At least on our campus, there is a fairly heavy tilt to Palestinian rights and freeing Palestine …[Harris] is trying to play both sides of that because she is not talking to college students…they were not her audience [during the debate].
College students are not going to swing this election, it’s going to be suburban women in swing states. It’s gonna be the [28%] of likely voters who still need to know more about Harris before they make up their mind. Some of those are going to be college students, but the vast majority of them are going to be middle class wage earners, salary earners in suburban areas.
For other issues like student loans, which is something the Biden administration has tried over and over again to forgive student loans, which is a big thing on the minds of college students…I think the only person to mention it was Trump, and it was to criticize the way that it rolled out. So in that sense, that was an attempt to win college voters.
But I didn’t see a whole lot of focus by either candidate that told me they were concerned by college age voters.
Q: How do you think Trump did in general in the debate?
A: It’s hard to answer these kinds of questions because we have different standards on what it means to do well in a debate. We think of a debate as being an intellectual battle, I think of them more as political events, like anything else that’s happening in a campaign.
You are always looking at, “what is my audience? Who are the persuadable voters out there and what could I say that would make them more likely to vote for me.”
If I’m thinking about Trump…I think he did very well for his base of support. They want to see him snarling, they want to see him attacking, they want to see him demeaning, they want to see him undermining as many points as he can in a way that might seem humorous.
It really riles his base up. Is that what he needs to do to win the race? That’s a different question, but he played well to his base.
His base could win him the election, but…typically what you are trying to do is you are trying to expand your base to others and he didn’t do a great job in that.
Q: How do you think Harris did in general in the debate?
A: I think she had a very tough job to do, because normally at this point of a presidential campaign we know a lot about a presidential candidate and we know very little about her and we still know very little about her after this.
I think one of the main things she was trying to accomplish was, up to now she has been pretty vague on policy, because she’s got a record on what she ran on in 2020…and what the Biden administration has done while she was vice president. That’s hard to run away from, but she has to in order to win the election. She’s got to distinguish herself from Biden, but she’s also got to distinguish herself from her 2020 self and those are very difficult things to do.
Plus, she’s a woman and women are evaluated differently in our gendered way that we examine political candidates.
Considering the difficulty of the job she had set for her, she did fairly well I think. Is it going to broaden the base enough for her to get more likely voters that will rather vote for her then not? Only time will tell. We have another two or three weeks before we see any data that reflects any movement towards her base on this debate.
My sense is that people wanted to see her specifically addressing policy issues, and she did that on a few issues that she cares about. On other issues she didn’t. So it depends on what issues are motivating voters.
Take Pennsylvania voters for example. Trump kept coming back to the issue of fracking and the one time she pushed back, it was on fracking, on the fact she doesn’t want to ban fracking. Why would she do that? Because Pennsylvania is a swing state and there’s a lot of oil production in Pennsylvania, where these things can become an issue.
That’s evidence of how she’s trying to speak specifically to a demographic that’s gonna hopefully swing the election for her one way or another.
Q: How has this debate changed the race?
A: We are not going to know that for a couple weeks…cause we need to see the data to be able to see which demographic was attracted to her more after the debate than before.
If I had to guess, number one, people will know her better than they knew her before by watching the debate. She really focused on addition to the policies…she was focusing on her story, being a prosecutor and growing up in a middle class family…being in a situation where she has to stand up for the interest of certain people in the senate and as a prosecutor. She wants the same people on her side now.
So in that sense I can imagine that if you’re a middle class suburban woman in Virginia and you voted for Biden last time, even though you are kind of moderate and you could have voted for Trump, maybe you did vote for Trump in 2016 but he turns you off because he’s completely abhorrent to you personally, did Kamala Harris give those kinds of voters enough cover to say “I ordinarily wouldn’t vote for a democrat but I’m going to do it again now.” I think there are probably people like that who are going to vote for her on that basis.
That’s why you saw her go back to the Republican endorsements that she had.
She mentions Dick Cheney of all people that endorsed her…for college students that’s going to be a negative because Dick Cheney is right in the center of the war on terror. He’s right in the center of the most horrible things the country has ever done, but that’s why it’s not about college students…because they are not going to swing this election for her. It’s about [the] middle class, mostly female voters.
Q: Who do you think won the debate in trying to present their ideas and policies?
A: You have to define what winning means in a policy debate. So to me what winning means is you are in control of the facts, you understand the details of any particular policy…you are able to pivot a question that’s asked about one thing and turn it into an issue that’s in your favor.
They asked Trump about foreign policy…and he turned it into an immigration answer, that’s a good example of a pivot.
If you are talking about policy in that sense, I think [Harris] won the debate.
Trump on the other hand was quite aggressive on certain policies, immigration for example, but never really got specific.
They asked him a specific question about how are you going to deport these millions of people you are planning on deporting…over and over again he wouldn’t answer the question.
If you are comparing them on control of the facts and the ability to turn those facts into advantages for you, I think Harris did a better job…It depends on who you are because a lot of stuff Trump did last night worked really well for his base, I’m just not a part of his base so I don’t think it would have worked really well for me.
