Debate Takeaways: Donald Trump Had a Lot to Do, and He Didn’t Do It

Debate Takeaways: Donald Trump Had a Lot to Do, and He Didn’t Do It

Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton debating on Wednesday night at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. It was the final debate before the Nov. 8 election.

Last chance, no backsies. The third and final presidential debate, held in Las Vegas on Wednesday night, was the last real chance for either Hillary Clinton or Donald J. Trump to shift the momentum of the 2016 campaign. Wherever the race is now, it is highly likely to stay that way for the next 19 days. So what happened? Here are our takeaways.

Trump took a chill pill

For much of the debate, viewers could — sort of, if they squinted — see the Donald Trump that his advisers and coaches had been trying to summon since the spring. He was less impulsive. He interrupted less often. Gone was the thin-skinned, jittery counterpuncher of the first two showdowns, when Mr. Trump could not resist lashing out whenever Mrs. Clinton rolled a grenade down the hall. There were times when he even seemed to remember the facts and talking points he had evidently been drilled on: missing State Department funds, for example, and a WikiLeaks email in which a top Clinton adviser lamented her bad instincts.

He knows which voters he needs

Mr. Trump seemed intent on stopping his bleeding among habitual Republican voters, whose support he needs to regain if he is to have even a slim hope of beating Mrs. Clinton. He spit out reasonably focused attacks on Mrs. Clinton’s support for the right to late-term abortion and promised to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices. For his own base of disenchanted working-class voters, there were riffs on the North American Free Trade Agreement and trade-related job losses. He promised tax cuts that would unleash prosperity for all — standard Republican fare that may prove comforting to some who are wavering on his candidacy.

But so does Clinton

Mrs. Clinton went to Las Vegas with a binder full of attacks on Mr. Trump and his treatment of women, all aimed at getting under his skin and reminding a crucial voting bloc of why it had abandoned him. While she was in Beijing defending women’s rights as first lady in the 1990s, Mrs. Clinton said, he was calling Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe, an “eating machine.” He said the women accusing him of sexual assault were too undesirable for him to have groped. “He goes after their dignity, their self-worth,” Mrs. Clinton said, “and I don’t think there’s a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like.” Mr. Trump was left to protest lamely, and falsely, that the accusations against him had been widely debunked. Gender gap, meet gender chasm.

The chill pill didn’t last

It didn’t take long for the “Saturday Night Live” caricature to emerge: a harrumphing Mr. Trump muttering, “Wrong,” as Mrs. Clinton went on the attack; a virtually incomprehensible riff on Syria and the Islamic State that ended with Mr. Trump declaring that Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war, had fallen to Russian and government troops (it hasn’t). He whiffed on chances to hit Mrs. Clinton on Wall Street and pivot to allegations of sexual assault against her husband, former President Bill Clinton. And toward the end of the debate, frustrated at Mrs. Clinton’s attacks on his tax avoidance, Mr. Trump called her a “nasty woman” — words that will most likely haunt him until Election Day and make it more difficult for him to recover the moderate female voters he needs to win.

The moderator, Chris Wallace, pushed Mr. Trump on whether he would “accept the result of this election,” a question that has raised hackles in recent days as Mr. Trump has floated unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. It wasn’t a well-framed query — many candidates demand recounts or challenge initial results — and a more agile debater might have pushed back. But when Mr. Wallace went further, asking whether the actual loser of the race should concede to the winner, Mr. Trump left him hanging. “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time,” he said. “I’ll keep you in suspense. O.K.?” That answer — splashed on front pages and replayed on television — is almost certain to pressure more Republicans into distancing themselves from him.

We’re right where we were

It wasn’t Mrs. Clinton’s best debate. It wasn’t Mr. Trump’s worst. But he needed more than a split decision. With Mr. Trump well behind in virtually every swing state and hemorrhaging support, he needed to force Mrs. Clinton into a stumble while somehow rebooting perceptions of himself. It was a tall order. And Mr. Trump did not deliver.