By Lauren Fedor and Alex Rogers in Washington and Steff Chávez in Charlotte
Donald Trump has ruled out another presidential debate against Kamala Harris, two days after a showdown when the Republican former US president was rattled by his Democratic opponent.
In a lengthy post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, Trump wrote there would be “NO THIRD DEBATE!” and insisted he “clearly won” Tuesday’s face-off with the vice-president in Philadelphia.
“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” he said on Truth Social. “KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD.”
Shortly after Trump’s post was published, Harris took the stage at a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she told supporters that she wanted the chance to debate the former president again.
“I believe we owe it to the voters to have another debate because this election and what is at stake could not be more important,” Harris said in her first campaign trail appearance since Tuesday’s showdown.
With less than two months to go until the presidential election, Trump’s comments appear to eliminate the possibility of another televised debate between the two candidates.
Harris was widely seen to have won Tuesday’s presidential debate, which was viewed by more than 67mn Americans, according to Nielsen estimates. The event marked the first time Trump and Harris had ever met, let alone sparred on the issues.
In a back-and-forth that lasted about 90 minutes, Harris appeared to get under Trump’s skin as she questioned his stance on everything from abortion to foreign policy. At one point, after the vice-president cast doubt on the size of the crowds at Trump’s campaign rallies, the former president railed about the number of illegal migrants, rehashing an internet conspiracy theory that some were stealing people’s pets to eat them.
A CNN poll conducted by SSRS after the debate found 63 per cent of 605 people who watched it thought Harris had won, compared with 37 per cent for Trump. Before the debate, a panel of voters was split evenly at 50-50 on which candidate would perform better.
The Trump campaign has dismissed polls suggesting Harris had won the debate. “We found that despite the best efforts of Kamala Harris and [the] media to portray the debate as some kind of overwhelming win for her, voters did not see it this way as support for her remained flat,” Trump pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis said in a memo published on Thursday.
Harris’s appearance in North Carolina pointed to her campaign’s hopes that the state is now increasingly a target for the Democratic candidate. The Financial Times poll tracker shows Trump with a lead of less than a single percentage point, a significant narrowing of the margin since the vice-president replaced Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket.
Trump was expected to hold his own rally in Tucson, Arizona, another crucial swing state, later on Thursday. The latest polling puts him ahead of Harris by just over 1 percentage point in the state.
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign on Thursday said it had raised $47mn in the 24 hours after the debate. By comparison, the vice-president’s team pulled in about $36mn after she announced she had selected Tim Walz as her running mate.
The latest haul will build upon Harris’s sizeable money advantage: her campaign said it had $404mn in cash on hand at the end of August, compared to the Trump campaign’s $295mn.
In North Carolina on Thursday, Harris criticised Trump’s debate performance, saying: “I talked about issues that I know matter to families across America . . . but that’s not what we heard from Donald Trump.”
She laughed as she repeated the former president’s debate stage claim that he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare: “You heard what he said in the debate: he has no plan to replace it. He said ‘concepts of a plan’.”
Harris and Trump remain neck-and-neck in both national opinion polls and surveys of voters in swing states that are likely to determine the outcome of the election.
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