Ninety percent of Americans likely already know who they are voting for. Only 10 percent can be swayed and boxing’s unique scoring system almost perfectly corresponds to this.
The first rule of deciding who won a major political debate is that nobody wins a major political debate. There is no final score as the buzzer sounds, no final wink to be tiddled, it is a purely subjective matter. And that will be true of the vice-presidential debate between Republican nominee JD Vance and Democratic nominee Tim Walz.
That having been said, I’ve recently adopted a method of scoring debates from the world of pugilistics, that I think actually gives a pretty decent assessment of what most American voters see.
My advice in picking a winner is to borrow the scoring system of a boxing match. The basic rules are relatively simple. In each round the boxer who wins the 3 minutes gets 10 points, the loser gets 9, unless there is a knockdown or it is overwhelming, in which case the round is scored 10-8. A tie is 10-10.
Obviously, a knockout ends the fight.
I first tried this approach last month with the Trump vs. Harris debate. And I wound up with Trump winning 157 to 150. It wasn’t the only reason I thought and wrote that night that Trump won the debate, despite overwhelming media insistence that girl boss Kamala had kicked ass. But it was part of it.
And with polling showing no significant bump for Harris since their face-off and the fact that we’ve even seen some Trump swing state surge since their debate, my ostentatious declaration of a Trump victory looks a little less crazy today.
