Shortly after the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, leftist pundits began crowing on social media about how conservatives’ complaints about the bias shown by two ABC moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, are just proof that Trump had lost the debate.  Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote this on X:

Expect @realDonaldTrump backers will claim it was 3 vs 1, but you know you lost the game when you end up complaining about the refs. Actually, the problem with the two moderators was less the uneven fact-checking than consistent lack of follow-ups to unanswered questions.

— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) September 11, 2024

In the vein of sports analogies, perhaps he’s right when it comes to the hardcore fans of the teams playing.  Just as any refs making a controversial call are immediately accused of bias by many fans of the home team when it appears to negatively impact their team, it’s just as predictable that many fans of the opponents will defend the refs as honest judges who are above such base motivations when it benefits their team.

But the left’s real problem isn’t with how Trump backers perceive the unfairness of the contest, and neither is it about how Democrat acolytes now supporting Kamala think the moderators were among the most fair and balanced adjudicators since King Solomon (it still feels wrong to call them “Kamala supporters” when she didn’t earn one pledged delegate in 2020 or even a single vote in the 2024 Democrat primary).

The real problem for the left, as they’re now discovering, is how everyone else will undoubtedly perceive the obvious unfairness on display.

Podcaster Tim Pool also envisioned a sports analogy for the debate.  He wrote on X:

Overall I thought the Trump v Muir debate went well for Trump

Muir got some jabs in but Trump countered well on some of them

Also Kamala was there

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) September 11, 2024

That’s an apter observation, and particularly for independent voters.  They were sold a high-stakes prize fight between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and what they witnessed was the referees methodically landing haymakers against Donald Trump on behalf of Kamala Harris in between punches.

That’s very different than a referee innocently making a bad call or two in a football game.  What the average spectator witnessed in the debate was very obviously nothing less than outright cheating.

And if there’s one thing most Americans hate, it’s a cheater… and any honest observer would surmise that ABC conspired with the DNC to cheat in that debate.

ABC’s left-leaning bias was well-known even before the debate.  Rich Noyes at the Media Research Center observed on September 9th that moderator David Muir’s evening newscast, World News Tonight, charted 100% positive coverage of Kamala Harris while coverage of Donald Trump was 93% negative.  Later, it was discovered that Linsey Davis and Kamala Harris are sorority sisters.

In other words, the moderators were hopelessly compromised before the candidates even took the stage.  And it only got worse from there.

As Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write at the Wall Street Journal, upon their reviewing and comparing notes, they “became concerned about the role of ABC News and what it did to our democracy.  The moderators, who were supposed to be neutral referees, had decided in advance that they were going to ‘fact check’ Mr. Trump but not Ms. Harris.”  They continue:

[Harris] enlisted every charge ever leveled against Mr. Trump, regardless of the truth. That included, to name a few, the false claims that he favors a national abortion ban and opposes in vitro fertilization, that he called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., ‘very fine people,’ and that he threatened a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses the election.

Each is untrue: Mr. Trump has made clear he opposes a national abortion ban. He favors IVF and has even said the government should pay for it. He condemned the Charlottesville neo-Nazis. And he predicted a financial ‘bloodbath’ for the auto industry if he loses and the Biden-Harris electric-vehicle mandates progress.

They go on to admit that had Kamala been challenged, given what we know about her inability to react well in such circumstances, we would very likely be talking about how Kamala didn’t perform well at all.

“When referees put their thumbs on the scale, the game changes,” they write.  “The results have to be thrown out, and we are robbed of our time.”

The corporate moguls at ABC News and the DNC sold their souls in arranging this outcome where Kamala Harris would be perceived by the public as the winner of the debate.  They knew that Trump supporters would loudly acknowledge the cheating on display and that the corporate media and the Democrat faithful would line up behind them in calling Trump a loser.

Again, what they didn’t count on was how everyone else would take it.  They must have imagined that Trump and the mainstream media would go to war afterward, certainly, but they think so little of the American people that it never occurred to them that Kamala would be inseparably associated with the cheaters.

Most people have a visceral reaction when “we are robbed of our time” by cheaters.  To demonstrate this, we can probably do better than a sports analogy.

Imagine standing in line for an hour in an amusement park, only to have the couple ahead of you let their friend cut the line.  You would not make any separation as to which party were more guilty of cheating between the one that cut the line and the one that facilitated the line-cutting.  They’re all cheaters, and you would immediately dislike them all.  And if you decide to speak up and enter an argument with those who allowed the line-cutting that robbed so many people of their time, it doesn’t make the line-cutter who got away with it any less disliked by those who watched the incident.

Kamala got away with it, so to speak. She emerged the winner of the debate, according to polls I’ve seen.  But she didn’t emerge unscathed.  Live analytics show that independents tracked closely with Republicans in favoring Trump’s comments during the debate.  And thus far, Kamala has enjoyed little or no bump for the media’s efforts to propel her to what can only be considered a pyrrhic victory.

And the reason for that isn’t mysterious.  Again, normal Americans just really, really don’t like cheaters.

And that’s a very bad thing for Democrats, because history shows that Americans also really, really don’t like Kamala Harris, who is the most unpopular vice president in American history  and who was rejected with extreme prejudice in the 2020 presidential campaign by even Democrat voters before being installed by the DNC without any voter consent whatsoever.

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.