Speaker 1: Let's get a fact check now of the debate. CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale was listening closely to both candidates. Daniel, what stood out to you?

Speaker 2: Jake, what stood out was that this was a staggeringly dishonest debate performance from former President Trump. Just lie after lie on subject after subject. By my preliminary count, Jake, Trump made at least 33 false claims. Thirty three. By contrast, by, again, a preliminary count, Vice President Harris made at least one false claim, though she added at least a few misleading claims and a few more that lack key context. I think a lot of Americans say, well, all politicians lie. No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency. A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true. And this wasn't like little exaggeration, political spin. A lot of his false claims were untethered to reality. On abortion, saying every Democrat wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, though actually more than 80 percent of Democrats supported Roe. On crime, saying it's through the roof, though it's actually sharply down since early 2023. It's now lower than it was since Trump left office. On health care, saying he's the one who saved Obamacare, the law he actually repeatedly tried to overturn. On Kamala Harris herself, saying that a Howard University grad, Black Law Students Association president, had claimed that she wasn't black at one point. Frankly, I don't have enough time here to run through each specific Trump false claim. I urge people to go to our CNN website or our app to read our team's detailed fact checks on this and a whole bunch more. For now, though, let's dive into one false claim Trump made, an egregious claim about migrants supposedly eating people's pets.

Speaker 3: In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating. They're eating the pets of the people that live there.

Speaker 2: This is not only false, I think it's fair to call this odious. This, for people who have not been online in the last couple of days, this claim about migrants, Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating people's pets originated with a Facebook post that attributed the claim to a neighbor's friend's daughter. So, you know, a third hand broken telephone kind of thing. The city of Springfield and the Springfield police say there are no credible reports of this happening. And even J.D. Vance, the vice presidential candidate who himself had promoted these claims, acknowledged this morning that the, quote, rumors might turn out false, although he still encouraged people to spread these cat memes. Now, I'll note that Trump himself added dogs to the equation. They had not even been part of these viral nonsense rumors before. Now, let's look at a one false claim that Vice President Harris did make about the economic situation that the Biden-Harris administration was left by Trump.

Speaker 4: Let's talk about what Donald Trump left us. Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess.

Speaker 2: So the Biden-Harris administration was not actually left the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. They were left a 6.4 percent unemployment rate in January 2021. That was certainly elevated by recent standards, pretty high, but it was significantly down from the 14.8 percent level it reached early in the pandemic. So it was already improving at the time the Biden-Harris administration took office. And that 6.4 percent level was the highest since the Great Recession. So in the last 20 years, not going back decades further.

Speaker 1: Anderson. Daniel, thanks very much. A lot to go through. We appreciate it.

Speaker 5: Joining me now to discuss all this, Leah Wright-Rigor, CNN political analyst and historian. Ron Brownstein, CNN political analyst. Bakari Sellers, also a CNN political commentator. And David Poliansky, who is a Republican strategist. Welcome to all of you. Thanks for starting off. I feel like I just kind of went to bed after the debate, in fairness. So I appreciate you guys hanging in there with me. Ron Brownstein, let's start with the big picture here, because there were so many such high stakes for Kamala Harris in this debate. She had not been in this kind of form before. She was facing someone who had been on this stage multiple times. I have to say, the Democrats that I talked to are absolutely thrilled this morning. Is that your takeaway, too? What are you looking at?

Speaker 6: I think the only way that debate could have gone better for her would have been if it was on October 20th and not September 10th, which is not an inconsiderable point. You know, I felt after the first debate with with Biden that if not for Biden's obvious deterioration, we would have been talking about how much Donald Trump's capacity to deliver an argument, to stay on point, to craft a message had declined. And that's what we saw tonight. I mean, the age contrast, the energy contrast, the vigor contrast, you know, last night. Yeah, I guess it was still still one. You know, one of the key problems Democrats have faced in this race is that Donald Trump's retrospective job approval rating has been increasing to a point where it has been higher in many polls than it was at any point during his presidency. Now, why is that? It's because voters, I think, have been judging him mostly through the lens of what they didn't like about Biden, particularly inflation. What the debate did last night was make remind voters everything else that comes with Donald Trump. And just one last point. Trump sounded like someone who was calling into a Fox news show. I mean, he he he has spent so much time speaking to his core audience, which is still a strength. And, you know, he's going to turn out a lot of those people that he thought I think he had lost the ability to talk to a broader audience defending the January 6th rioters, saying that everybody wanted Roe v. Wade to be overturned, claiming again that he won the election and kind of the peak of this, you know, insisting that in a very kind of racist argument that immigrants are eating people's cats and dogs. It was all he looked like someone who was coming out of a dark movie theater into sunshine and kind of squinting because he has spent so much time talking to this narrow universe. He really had nothing to say to a broader audience. Now, real quick, I mean, the underlying realities are still there. Sixty percent of Americans think they are not better off because of the policies of the Biden administration. When Trump was able to get to that, it's a reminder that those are going to be headwinds for Harris. But she could not have done any more than she did last

Speaker 5: Well, David Polanski and Leah, I want you to weigh in and honestly, I want everybody to weigh in on this. But David, I want to I would like you to defend to address this point of the because I got multiple notes from people say, well, it's like I think we have seen which candidate is entirely online because there were these all of these moments where Trump was focused on issues that seem very in one corner of the universe. You know, I was talking to it's anecdata, but when you get text from all your family members who don't really pay attention to this stuff until a big moment like this, they're kind of like, what is this? What is he talking about?

Speaker 7: I don't know fully, but look, I think last night, all of us that have been a part of politics for most of our adult lives and and participated in debates know one truism, which is if you end up sending your candidate to the spin room after a debate, you didn't win. And last night, Donald Trump went to the spin room inexplicably and took questions from the press. The vice president went to a debate watch party. It's a pretty good sign of where they both felt the night ended up. And, you know, in terms of the message, look, she was incredibly well prepared. Make no mistake. You could see that from the start. But I think the most important part of it was she was on offense from the minute she not only the minute she started talking, but the minute she walked on stage, she walked across to former President Trump's podium and made him shake her hand. She was prepared. She was confident and she was on offense from the start. And I think that played into his worst fears in terms of not only not being able to proactively drive his message, but to your point, fall back to what he's comfortable with, which is more conservative media.

Speaker 8: I mean, I think from the very beginning, one of the things that Ron brought up was that those of us who watched Joe Biden versus Donald Trump realizes that Donald Trump gave the second worst debate performance in American history. The problem was that the person who gave the worst debate in American history was also on that stage. And so when you actually tell you've been free to say that, two months ago, 75 days makes a lot of difference. When you take when you take Joe Biden out of that debate, you see someone who is not capable. And that gave Kamala Harris a little a little bit of the confidence. Look, she was nervous the first five, six, seven minutes. Everybody saw it. And she had the ability to bait him and counterpunch him. And that's what I said this debate was going to be about. It reminded me so much of Ryan Garcia versus Devin Haney, which was a fight that happened maybe three months ago.

Speaker 5: You are going to have to film me. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8: No, I mean, Devin Haney was supposed to be a jabber and a good puncher. And Ryan Garcia was a counterpuncher. And Kamala Harris came out and she baited, she baited, she used the jab and then she counterpunched, she counterpunched. She was able to hit him, pivot and move to the American people. Last night, you saw someone who was very prepared and you knew about 928, I think I marked it. 928 was when this thing was over. That's when she went into the rallies, when she started talking about his rallies, which

Speaker 5: for him, it wasn't clear it was going to be over at that point. Oh, but once he sort of came back at her, those of us around the orbit said, look, at

Speaker 8: that point he was going to unravel, it was going to go downhill and she was going to be able to find a groove. Up until that point, it might have been even, it might have been nip and tuck. The abortion answer was before that. That was pretty strong, though. She was strong, but he unraveled. Yeah, he unraveled on rallies. She gave a very sound answer on reproductive freedom, scoring on substance. But he was done for after she questioned the size of his.

Speaker 5: Well, it was two pronged, right? Because on the one hand, she had to make a case for herself and her own policies. And she was put on comfortable footing when she was asked very near at the top of the debate about abortion. And we saw that some of that nervousness fade away when she did that. And Leah then, as Bokhari points out, the other thing that she was clearly had spent a lot of time practicing was how to get under Donald Trump's skin. And the other thing that kept sticking out to me, too, was that she clearly had studied how to use the split screen to her own advantage. And we've seen times when that can cause problems for candidates. I mean, when Barack Obama debated Mitt Romney the first time, it was the way he looked kind of agitated in the box next to Mitt Romney that made it seem as though he was struggling. She was doing things like this. I mean, and if if you've opened your social media feed this morning, that is what you

Speaker 9: are seeing. Yeah. And I think also one of the things that she did really quite effectively is she has this line that she's been repeating over and over on the campaign trail, which is that Donald Trump is a deeply unserious man. He is a deeply unserious candidate who has serious consequences for the American public. Those facial expressions, that mastery of the split screen was all about showing the nation just how unserious but how dangerous he is.