THE DEBATE ABOUT THE DEBATE

Maybe not what you think

Debate winner: CNN's Candy Crowley. In 2012, she -- the moderator -- interjected herself into a Romney-Obama debate to fact-check Mitt Romney with a lie. But unlike ABC's crack moderators on Tuesday night, at least she only did it once.

            I'm exhausted from fact-checking ABC's fact-checkers, so I'm just going to tell you about a brilliant experiment that pretty clearly established who won the Trump-Clinton debates in 2016.

            The media say Trump whiffed Tuesday night, but that's what we were told in 2016, too. It also could be that Kamala Harris came across as a smirker -- MSNBC's signature move -- just like Hillary Clinton did. You've probably forgotten this, if you ever knew it, but notwithstanding Clinton’s allegedly devastating debate performances with Trump, she bombed. There's scientific proof.

            Feminists were ecstatic when Trump called Clinton "a nasty woman" at one of the debates, rushing out with "nasty woman" T-shirts, pins, backpacks and other merchandise. With the feminists' usual finger on the pulse of the nation, it never occurred to them that maybe she was nasty.

            Trump was responding to Clinton’s snotty aside -- while describing her Social Security plans, of all things:

            Clinton: "My Social Security payroll contribution will go up, as will Donald’s -- assuming he can’t figure out how to get out of it -- but what we want to do is --"

            Trump: "Such a nasty woman."

            In order to test the feminist theory that Clinton, as a woman, was judged much more harshly than Trump, a couple of professors at New York University and INSEAD designed the perfect experiment. Two months after the election, they re-created the 2016 debates, but with a man playing Clinton and a woman playing Trump.

            Professional actors were hired to reenact segments from each of the three debates, using the candidates' exact words, gestures, intonation and stances. During rehearsals, they even had a screen with the actual debate running behind them to ensure a precise replica of the candidates' performances, with only the genders inverted. (For you confused Gen Z’ers, back then there were only two genders.)

            The professors and their (sold-out) audiences were stunned by the result. As NYU professor Joe Salvatore put it, instead of confirming their "liberal assumption" that "no one would have accepted Trump’s behavior from a woman, and that the male Clinton would seem like the much stronger candidate," audience members found themselves hating the male Clinton and being impressed by the female Trump.

            This is how Salvatore described the reactions:

            "We heard a lot of 'now I understand how this happened' -- meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman -- that was a theme. One person said, ‘I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.’ Another -- a musical theater composer, actually -- said that Trump created ‘hummable lyrics,’ while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she said was true and factual, but there was no 'hook' to it." (Sadly, the Trump bump among the musical theater crowd was short-lived.)

            One audience member said she found the [male] Clinton “really punchable.”

            I suspect the Trump-Harris debate will elicit similar reactions. Trump is Trump, a known quantity. His scattershot delivery isn't going to shock anyone. If you already detest the man, your view was confirmed. But if you don't hate him, Trump put a lot of points on the board, while Harris said nothing, and said it smugly.

            The debate sure didn't give undecided voters what they wanted from Harris. As has been widely reported, they are waiting breathlessly for some hint of what she believes and what she would do as president. After the ABC debate, they're still waiting. About all they learned is that Harris comes from a middle-class family. (That regular guy routine worked great for John Kasich!)

            But they know that life was better under Trump. And they know that Harris, like Clinton, is a nasty woman.