Debate Analysis Fueled by Bottomless Rosé

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/podcasts/debate-analysis-fueled-by-bottomless-rose.html

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It’s 1 a.m. in the newsroom. The third and final presidential debate is over and cheap rosé has made its way into flimsy paper cups.

It’s time for The Run-Up’s post-debate analysis. We answer the big questions: Who won? What surprised us? How much will it change the race?

And we tackle the not-so-big questions: Were the Emmys rigged against Donald J. Trump?

I recruited two of my smartest colleagues, Amy Chozick and Nicholas Confessore, for a bleary-eyed discussion from our studio.

Ms. Chozick and I had just finished writing a post-debate analysis in which we say that “Mrs. Clinton outmaneuvered Mr. Trump with a surprising new approach: his.”

“Hillary Clinton very much came out ready to hammer him,” Ms. Chozick says on the show. “She almost took the role of him, bullying the man who pretends to be the bully.” She brought the same level of debate prep that she’s had at all the debates, she says, but “this time the comebacks and attacks did not feel as canned and corny as they did the first time. They really stuck. And I think they got under his skin.”

Mr. Confessore questions our take that Mr. Trump was in any way trounced. “Given his limits as a candidate and temperament, I think this was probably the most mature debater we were likely to see from Donald Trump in this election,” he says. “There are people out there who just want to hear him talk like a normal Republican for like five minutes so they can tell themselves it’s O.K. to go in there and pull the lever for him. So for those people I think tonight helped a bit.”

“On the other hand,” he continues, “the offsetting problem for him is women and college-educated people and more affluent voters. I think there were many points tonight when he hurt himself with those groups.”

“This was a much more policy-driven debate, and Donald Trump was just out-policy-talked by her,” Ms. Chozick argues.

Confessore agrees that Mr. Trump seemed out of his element on some of the policy talk. “The thing that really got me, there was that 90-second riff on ISIS and Aleppo and the Middle East, and if I had to diagram that sentence, it would take me a five-foot-wide piece of printer paper," he says.

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