The United States presidential election campaign is anything but boring, and one doesn’t need to go any further than the political debates, the latest of which was Tuesday night’s epic match-up between Vice-President Ms Kamala Harris and former President Mr Donald Trump on ABC News.

Nearly all the opinion surveys by the news networks, including CNN’s instant poll of debate watchers, agreed that Ms Harris demolished Mr Trump, showing calm and command of the stage, baiting him and throwing him off balance for most of the 90-minute encounter watched by millions around the world.

The CNN poll story headlined ‘Kamala Harris ran away with it’, said 63 per cent of those who watched the debate — a group that is not representative of the electorate as a whole — said Ms Harris won, while just 37 per cent said Mr Trump was the victor.

Political analyst Mr Brit Hume of the pro-Trump Fox News said: “Look, make no mistake about it, Trump had a bad night. He rose to the bait repeatedly when she baited him… In this debate we heard so many of the old grievances we thought Trump had learned were not winners politically… So, my sense is, she came out in pretty good shape.”

It was a stunning turnaround from the earlier debate on June 27, 2024 on CNN when Mr Trump obliterated President Joe Biden, leading to him dropping out of the presidential race, and immediately seizing a sizeable lead in the national polls.

Those polls only tightened to neck-and-neck status after Ms Harris became the Democratic nominee, sparking wild celebrations, unbridled enthusiasm, and belief that the party could indeed win the election set for November 5, 2024.

As if things had not gone well enough for her Tuesday night, Ms Harris was the immediate beneficiary of a massive endorsement from pop culture icon Taylor Swift, who told her 283-million strong global following: “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

A measure of Ms Swift’s political clout is that Mr Trump, prior to the debate, reposted an AI rendition of her supporting the Republican candidate and then welcomed it. That was given by Ms Swift as one reason she came out at this time.

The influential New York Times commented: “The endorsement by Ms Swift, delivered minutes after Ms Harris and Mr Trump had stepped off the debate stage in Philadelphia, offers Ms Harris an unrivalled celebrity backer and a tremendous shot of adrenaline to her campaign, especially with the younger voters she has been trying to attract.”

Ms Swift, who endorsed Mr Biden ahead of his 2020 election, in a post on her Instagram account last year, encouraged her supporters at the time to vote, and included a link to the website Vote.org. The site later reported a significant 35,252 new registrations that day, in a non-election year to boot.

Not unexpectedly, some political pundits have cautioned Democrats not to get too giddy over Ms Harris’s debate performance, noting that in 2016, the then party’s candidate, Ms Hillary Clinton, won her debates with Mr Trump, only to lose the election of that year.

The question now is how impactful will the Harris debate beating of Mr Trump be in the coming elections, with the two candidates virtually tied, according to the latest polls, in the seven battleground states?