Rolling Stone: “By early Wednesday morning, multiple Trump aides were telling Rolling Stone that their boss did not perform as well as they wished, that Harris had exceeded expectations, or simply that — in the words of one of the sources — getting Trump onstage for another debate against Harris is ‘not a priority’ for the campaign and its candidate right now.”

“A person close to Trump who was in Philadelphia on Tuesday simply told Rolling Stone Wednesday morning, ‘bad idea,’ when asked if Trump should debate Harris another time. This source wouldn’t elaborate, but it was clear that there’s an understanding within the upper ranks of Trumpland that the debate was not the knockout blow for ‘defining’ the vice president for which they had wished.”

“The former president himself has been adamant that only losers request rematches, and maintained — despite every indicator to the contrary — that he was Tuesday night’s victor.”

Sara Longwell: “I conduct focus groups with voters every week, and I’ve heard one theme come up again and again: They often worry about Harris’s ability to stand up to dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.”

“Last night, Trump was, in a certain sense, a stand-in for strongmen like Putin and Xi, and the voters I spoke with right after the debate said that Harris held her own. They appreciated her ability to bait Trump, counter his lies, and look calm while doing it. Her decision to point out how easily foreign despots use flattery to influence Trump also did her a lot of good.”

Karl Rove: “Will this debate have an effect? Yes, though perhaps not as much as Team Harris hopes or as much as Team Trump might fear. But there’s no putting lipstick on this pig. Mr. Trump was crushed by a woman he previously dismissed as ‘dumb as a rock.’ Which raises the question: What does that make him?”

“Donald Trump’s performance in Tuesday night’s debate is likely to exacerbate the widening financial gap that he faces with Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now enjoying her eighth week of momentum with big and small donors alike,” the New York Times reports.

“Several large donors and fund-raising activists for Mr. Trump, along with their advisers, described the debate as a significant missed opportunity for him to firm up his support with voters and major contributors. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, Mr. Trump’s financial backers were giddy to the point of almost overconfident. Now, his wealthy supporters are confronting the possibility that they may be dramatically outspent.”

Rolling Stone: Kamala Harris is clobbering Trump in the money race.

Charlie Warzel: “The definitive image from last night’s debate is a very specific split-screen view of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. In the left frame, Trump is mid-monologue, lips pursed and gesticulating. Harris occupies the right box, clearly watching her opponent. She’s leaning back ever so slightly, her hand on her chin. On her face is something halfway between a grimace and an incredulous smile—a facial expression that many Harris supporters likely recognize as a universal, exasperated response to a Trump rant.”

“It was a good look. While Trump seethed, Harris seemed amused. She offered righteous indignation while attacking Trump’s position on abortion, his love for authoritarian strongmen, and his bald-faced lies about immigrant crime. She effectively baited Trump numerous times—most memorably about crowd sizes at his rallies. All of this was rhetorically significant on its own, and yet, somehow, Harris seemed most withering and effective in the moments when Trump was speaking—the moments when she was able to look across the stage and act almost as an audience barometer for Trump’s answers…”

“What Harris’s body language and forceful rhetoric have in common is that they diminish Trump, and do so in a manner that succeeds where other Trump opponents have failed.”

A new Marquette University Law School Poll in Wisconsin finds Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump among likely voters, 52% to 48%.

In a multi-candidate field — where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remains on the ballot — Harris leads Trump, 47% to 43%.

In the U.S. Senate race, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) leads challenger Eric Hovde (R), 52% to 47%.

Michael Tomasky: “Kamala Harris was really good Tuesday night—really, really good. She accomplished everything she needed to accomplish. She sliced and diced him. She dangled bait and he leapt at the hook. But as good as she was, Trump was more bad than Harris was good. Or maybe he was bad because she was good: That is to say, she wrong-footed him time after time after time in ways that President Joe Biden did not, throwing him off his game, staring him down, speaking directly to him, challenging him, saying ‘you’ and pointing right at him. She spanked him. Said Stephanie Ruhle, in a judgment Trump would consider crushing: ‘She beat him at the business of television.'”

“In sports, when Team A looks shaky, the announcers don’t often point out that Team A looks shaky because Team B is just so goddamn good. Well, that’s what was happening here. Harris was consistently sharp, and Trump was consistently tripped up.”

“It’s still true that he got in a few good licks here and there. He landed a punch or two on the border. And now, simply by virtue of having been the president for four years, he knows some stuff that he didn’t know in 2016… But overall, Trump was just, well, sad. He needs to reach for a world leader who vouches for him, and the wheel lands on…Viktor Orban?”

National Review: “If you’re obsessing over how bad, how in the tank for Kamala Harris, the two ABC news moderators were, it’s because you don’t want to come to grips with the brute fact that Donald Trump was a disaster last night. He was unhinged, often incoherent, incapable of completing thoughts and sentences when he had points to make, and led into self-absorbed rabbit-holes — claims that he won the 2020 election, the size of his rallies, whether ‘migrants’ are eating stolen pets — that diverted him from opportunity after opportunity to expose Harris as a radical leftist now pretending to be a pragmatic centrist who suddenly loves her some guns.”

“Trump had one job: stay on message about Harris’s dizzying renunciations of her positions — so inexplicable that Harris has dribbled them out through nameless campaign sources rather than addressed them in her own voice…”

“Trump couldn’t do it. And yes, that’s largely because he is an undisciplined solipsist so effortlessly drawn into railing about rally attendance when the subject at hand is Harris’s indefensible border record — and if you think last night’s target audience cares whether the interlocutor steering Trump off course was Harris or the moderators, then you’re missing the point.”

“But there’s more to it than that. Trump also couldn’t stick to deconstructing Harris’s ‘values’ bunk because his own values are always negotiable.”

David Graham: “Here’s the background, for those not immersed in the conservative internet. For the past few days, allies of Trump have, without offering a shred of evidence, spread reports about Haitian immigrants in the central-Ohio town of Springfield eating pet cats. The town has seen thousands of new arrivals from the stricken Caribbean nation; authorities there say they’ve helped revitalize the local economy. But, as the debate moderator David Muir immediately clarified, the Springfield city manager says there have been no credible reports of pet-eating. Local police have said the same. Trump weakly protested that he’d seen the claims on television, though he of all people should know better than to believe everything on TV.”

“Despite the lack of evidence, conservative influencers have insisted that incidents are widespread, eager or content to spread hatred of dark-skinned immigrants and gin up votes.”

“Until Tuesday, Donald Trump spent much of the campaign running as an insurgent,” Politico reports.

“But in one night, Kamala Harris changed all that. After weeks of intense scrutiny on her own policy pivots over the years, the vice president deftly shifted the focus of the campaign to a referendum on Trump’s presidency.”

“As the candidates left the debate stage, the momentum Harris had generated after first replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee seemed to be cresting again. Her campaign manager announced she was ready for another debate with Trump, who himself plodded into the spin room in Philadelphia in an effort to shift the unfavorable post-debate narrative that saw even Fox News hosts declare Harris the winner.”

Jonathan Last: “You never know if a politician can play on the national stage until they do it. Sometimes a promising candidate pops. Sometimes they’re Ron DeSantis.”

“At every turn over the last seven weeks, Harris popped. From her first speech at the campaign HQ in Delaware, to the first big rally, to her convention speech, to the debate—she answered the bell every time.”

“She is not coasting. She is not simply existing as a non-octogenarian alternative to Trump. She is waging a smart, vigorous campaign and executing at a high level.”

Peter Wehner: “I’ve been watching presidential debates since 1976, and I’ve even been peripherally involved in a few. And I’ve never seen a candidate execute a debate strategy as well as Harris did.”

“The night, for Harris supporters, went better than even the most optimistic among them could have hoped. For Trump supporters, it was not just a defeat but a public humiliation, the crushing comeuppance they probably secretly feared might one day arrive but, until now, never quite had.”

“What Harris appeared to understand, better than anyone else who has debated Trump, is that the key to defeating him is to trigger him psychologically.”

Dan Balz: “Ever since President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign, former president Donald Trump has been sour and on the defensive. His new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, made clear in their scorching debate here Tuesday night that she will spend the next two months trying to keep him there.”

“If debates matter, this one should. But the overriding question in such a divided country is whether it will.”

“The final weeks of the campaign promise to be as contentious as the 90-minute encounter at the National Constitution Center and hosted by ABC News, with polls showing no clear leader and a nation hanging nervously on the outcome. If there were doubts about Harris’s ability to weather what will be a brutal stretch, they were at least partially answered with her sharp and steady performance on Tuesday. But given the state of the race, neither candidate can afford missteps or mistakes.”

A group of uncommitted, swing-state voters thought Kamala Harris performed better in last night’s debate, regardless of how they plan to vote in November, the Washington Post reports.