The much-anticipated debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump took place on Tuesday night. It was the first time the two politicians had met. 

With national polls showing the race for the White House a tossup, this debate, currently the only one that is scheduled, has outsized significance. In a CNN flash poll following the debate, 63% said that Harris performed the best. This flipped the script from the Trump-Biden debate in June, when 67% of respondents said that Trump outperformed President Joe Biden.

In other breaking news following the debate, pop megastar Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president. In a post on Instagram to her 283 million followers, Swift wrote, “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them." She highlighted “LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body.”

Vermont Sen. Peter Welch spoke this morning about his thoughts on the debate, the 2024 election, cutting off arms sales to Israel, voter suppression and election violence, and his reflections on the 9/11 attacks. 

In July, the Democrat sent shock waves through the political establishment when he became the first U.S. senator to call for Biden to withdraw from the race. Eleven days later, as other Democratic leaders made similar calls, Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris. The vice president officially became the Democratic nominee in August, launching one of the most compressed presidential races in history.

“I was just saying out loud what many of my colleagues and many Americans were saying privately,” Welch said.

After watching the Biden-Trump debate in June, Welch concluded, “It was terrible, and it was not about a bad night. It was about an apprehension that there was a serious condition that was affecting the president who served us very well.” Welch insisted that he was neither asked nor dissuaded by his colleagues or the White House when he told them what he was going to do.

Welch had a very different reaction to Harris’s debate performance against Trump. “I thought she did absolutely everything she had to do,” he said. “She was strong. I love the way she started out by crossing the stage, extending her hand to Trump, taking over the physical space and not letting him do his physical intimidation moves that are his favorite.”

Welch said that Harris “was able to parry his attacks, and she had a capacity to do something effectively, and that's ridicule and belittle a guy who is well deserving of ridicule and belittling.”

Vermont’s junior senator said that the most memorable part of the debate was the discussion of abortion rights. Harris, Welch said, “combined clarity with compassion and a deeply grounded, deeply felt moral sensibility about the right of women to make their own decisions. And she did that in a way where she was rightly and justifiably condemning a totally incoherent policy by Trump, somebody who bragged about getting the Supreme Court stacked to get rid of Roe v. Wade.”

Welch said the race for president is too close to call. He believes that if Trump loses, he will once again declare that the election was stolen. “That's the pitch he's making to prepare his voters for an explanation of his loss as fraud,” he said.

Welch, who was in the House chamber when Trump supporters attacked on January 6, 2021, asserted, “I don't think you'll get away with that kind of insurrection again.” But he warned against a raft of voter suppression efforts, such as in Georgia “where that very Trumpish legislature is stacking the deck with partisan folks on their election commission.”

Voter suppression and Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power is “a real live issue for us. When I say us, I mean our country,” he said.