U.S. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump had never met until their presidential debate Tuesday night, but immediately started sparring in a pivotal encounter leading up to the national election on November 5.

The two candidates shook hands at the outset, took their places behind lecterns on a stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and then started assailing each other.

They feuded about the U.S. economy, abortion rights for American women, immigration at the U.S. border with Mexico, the Israeli war against Hamas militants in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as Congress certified that Trump had lost the 2020 election.

Referring to the 2020 election that Trump lost to President Joe Biden, Harris said, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. He has a very difficult time processing that.”

Trump recently said he lost the election “by a whisker,” but on the debate stage Tuesday, he said it was a sarcastic remark and refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2020 outcome.

“We are a failing nation,” Trump said. “We are in serious decline, and we’re laughed at all over the world.’’

In a snap poll after the 90-minute debate, CNN said its survey showed Harris had won the encounter by a 63-37% margin.

In addition to that quick assessment favoring Harris, the world’s top pop singer, Taylor Swift, endorsed the Democrat as the debate ended.

Standing a short distance away from each other, the two candidates shook their heads at each other’s comments, with Harris all but laughing out loud at some of Trump’s remarks. ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis gamely tried to control the flow of the encounter, failing at times.

Biden stumbled badly in a June debate with Trump and within a month ended his campaign as he endorsed Harris, his second-in-command.

On Tuesday, Harris, a former local criminal prosecutor in San Francisco and attorney general in California accustomed to tough courtroom encounters with defense attorneys, repeatedly baited Trump with insults.

At one point, she told him that his staunchest supporters at his political rallies often left early because they were bored with his speeches.

He described her as a Marxist, saying she was taught well by her father, a leftist economist. “This is a radical left liberal,” Trump said of Harris.

She recited her middle-class upbringing where her mother saved money for years before having the wherewithal to buy a house when she was a teenager.

Meanwhile, Harris said Trump was handed $400 million by his father “on a silver platter and then filed for bankruptcy six times.”

Trump assailed Biden and Harris’ handling of the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, saying the U.S. is becoming “Venezuela on steroids.” She said his plan for imposing up to 20% tariffs on imported foreign goods would prove to be a “Trump sales tax” for American consumers.

She blamed him for the end to a constitutional right to abortion with his appointment of three conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. He said that with the 2022 ruling, voters in individual states could now decide the issue.

“The government and Trump should not be telling” women what to do with their bodies, Harris said.

Trump blamed Harris as part of the Biden administration’s failure to control the masses of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump has said he plans to deport 11 million or more undocumented migrants living in the U.S. but twice dodged Muir’s question of how he would arrest people and send them back to their home countries.

The former president repeatedly answered unrelated questions with comments about Harris’ handling of the border, with Republicans calling her the “border czar” because Biden tasked her to help determine the root causes of why people leave their Central American homes to trek to the United States.

Trump made the outlandish claim that Haitian migrants in the Midwestern city of Springfield, Ohio, were stealing their neighbors’ cats and dogs and killing them for food.

Muir rebuked Trump and said the city’s manager had assured ABC News the claim was not true.

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