After Monday night’s debate, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks to viewers at a debate-watch party at The Space at Westbury, New York. | Getty Clinton team celebrates a win Democrats’ jitters eased as she scores points and finds attack lines to carry into the next debates.

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y.—Hillary Clinton plays chess. Donald Trump plays craps.

Chess isn’t for everyone. It takes a long time. It's complicated. The chess team has a tendency to get beat up. Craps is fun. It's thrilling. Maybe you win big. Maybe you lose. But in the moment, what a show.


Clinton’s campaign wanted the debate to make the many millions of people who watched think hard about each candidate as president—no matter what happens, “We win because more people are watching,” deputy communications director Christina Reynolds said two hours before the lights went up on Lester Holt.

And they wanted a real-time test of their organization versus Trump’s, both in a war room that drowned reporters in prepared emails and several times got so loud with cheers that aides missed parts of the debate and in a spin room that matched billionaire Mark Cuban, Obama mastermind David Plouffe and Brigadier General John Douglass against Don King, wandering around in his Mt. Rushmore airbrushed denim jacket and American and Israeli flags, and a couple of cable news talking head supporters like A.J. Delgado.

She moved in her pawns, her rooks, her bishops. He rolled the dice, shot them across the table. Her gambits worked.

“He was rattled that he had trouble competing in the arena,” said Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. “He became unhinged.”

Clinton’s campaign lined up this debate as the most important but just first volley in what will be a sustained attack through the second debate in St. Louis and the third in Las Vegas. And her allies were immediately daring Trump to try squelching on showing up for those, as he’s flirted with.

Even Trump acolyte Rudy Giuliani was admitting afterward that it didn’t go well and her team is now hoping that will goad the Republican nominee into another edition of blaming trusting aides over his own instincts, and coming into the next debate with a different demeanor. “It’s hard. We saw with Al Gore, we had three different Al Gores,” Plouffe said afterward. “That didn’t work out so well.”

Her team sees a number of winning lines coming out of the debate to carry into the next: Trump was a mess on birtherism (works with African-Americans, and anyone who loves President Barack Obama), his answer on his tax returns could be interpreted as that he didn’t pay taxes at all in any year (works with middle class swing voters and any hesitant Republican-leaning independent wondering what he’s hiding), he talked about his own business interests more than any jobs plan (works again with those middle class voters, particularly the college educated women that have been wavering a whole lot more than Clinton can be comfortable with).

But Trump's appeal is to anyone who thinks flailing rage at the system is fine if that cracks a system that isn’t working. Every time he seemed prepared with a line, it was to point out how long Clinton had been around and not solved the problems she was talking about. “Hillary has experience, but it’s bad experience,” Trump said, finally getting across his point after the clock had already run past the 90-minute mark.

Clinton tried to keep the focus only on the flailing. Her aides said he made that easier than they’d prepared for Monday night. “He was baited even when you didn’t try to bait,” said Clinton top adviser Jennifer Palmieri, who sat in on many of Clinton’s prep sessions.

Trump’s debate prep was enough that he kept himself to calling his opponent “Secretary Clinton” instead of “Hillary,” at least for the first half of the night, but not enough to hold himself back from yelling interruptions at her, or being caught prickly on her raising questions about the money his father gave him to start his business, and apparently unwilling to get a more convincing answer on whatever he wants to call his current position on birtherism.

The Clinton campaign and the Obama alums, scarred from the president flubbing it in his first debate in 2012 against Mitt Romney, were horrified about a repeat, and with a weaker candidate. They walked out of Hofstra feeling good.

But the most important constituency that Clinton may have hit on Monday night: what Rep. Xavier Becerra, spinning for Clinton here at Hofstra afterward joked are the “perpetual freaker-outers,” or nearing 100 percent of the Democratic electorate who keep poll websites on constant refresh and have been cornering the market on Xanax prescriptions as the national numbers have tilted more and more toward Trump.

“I don't think Trump fell on his face, but she pushed back in a really strong and measured way—which I think is important,” said Mitch Stewart, battleground states director for Obama’s reelection campaign, who was watching from home as a supporter of but not affiliated with Clinton. “She also came across as friendly—much more so than Trump. She was likable in this debate and maybe that is the most important thing for her to accomplish.”

Plouffe, who spent all his years with Obama laughing off the “bedwetters,” laughed again Monday night when asked if Clinton had gotten them under control.

“That’s a hard thing to fix,” he said. “Did she give Dems more reason to go out and knock doors? Did she give some Democrats who didn’t know if they were going to vote in this election, I think she did. But I also think she did quite a bit of good with moderate swing voters.”

“She gave Democrats a lot of reason to calm down,” Plouffe said. “But that’s how we are.”

“It was an awesome night for Democrats,” said DNC member Robert Zimmerman, as he headed out of the debate space Monday night. “There’ll be no bedwetting for 12 hours.”

