CNN
—
Kamala Harris’ joyful campaign will Tuesday be hit by the blunt force of reality — a debate with Donald Trump — the most menacing political foe of modern times.
The vice president transformed the 2024 election after President Joe Biden’s abject debate showing against Trump on CNN in June led him to end his reelection bid. She restored several swing states to the electoral battlefield and has had Democrats dreaming of a stunning turnabout in a race most thought they were well on the way to losing.
Yet her success in unifying her party, branding herself as a fresh voice of generational change and closing into a dead heat with Trump in polling has so far not cemented a reliable path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Indeed, if the election were on Tuesday, the ex-president, who has already defied an assassination attempt and scores of criminal charges, could still win.
Presidential debates usually don’t decide elections — notwithstanding the cataclysmic impact of Biden’s wipeout. But Tuesday night represents the best remaining chance for Harris to drive home a decisive argument that could thwart Trump’s historic comeback.
Her assignment in Philadelphia will require the use of rhetorical skills that have been often questioned in an uneven vice presidency. While she has had her moments in debates and Senate hearings, Harris has sometimes struggled to articulate clear policies and answers under pressure in spontaneous situations. Her willingness to submit to only one major media interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, on CNN last month, has only raised the bar for her performance in what is so far the only scheduled debate with Trump. And while the former president has now taken part in presidential debates in three separate elections, this will be Harris’ first venture onto the debate stage since her meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence in 2020.
As she seeks to become the first Black woman and South Asian president, Harris will come into close quarters for the first time with a rival who will do anything to win and who has a history of using racial and gendered tropes for political gain. Trump has questioned her intelligence and race as a Black woman and has amplified a sexual innuendo about her on social media. But the vice president seems determined not to be drawn into his traps. She refused in her CNN interview to address Trump’s race-based rhetoric, dismissing it as the “same old, tired playbook” and adding, “Next question, please.”
Harris has far less top-level political experience than either 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or Biden when they confronted Trump in presidential debates. And even some members of her own party didn’t believe that she was the strongest potential Democratic leader for a post-Biden era.
But on Tuesday, Harris has a chance to change perceptions about her political acumen and to put down a marker for the sprint to November 5.
A campaign that has been about avoiding error and limiting unscripted public exposure for the vice president faces a nowhere-to-hide moment on prime-time television. And the price of failure is enormous — as it could put a strongman ex-president, who tried to subvert US democracy after the 2020 election, on the road to a new presidency devoted to “retribution.” The stakes for Democrats were emphasized on Saturday when Trump vowed in a social media post to prosecute and jail election officials, political opponents, donors and others who he suggests will have “cheated” in the election, as he made yet more untrue accusations that his 2020 loss was the result of voter fraud.
Still, if Harris can withstand the pressure and stare down the onslaught from Trump, the debate offers her significant opportunities — potentially more than those open to Trump, who’s already a love-him-or-hate-him known quantity.
A successful performance on Tuesday night could establish a platform for the vice president to convince undecided voters in critical swing states that she has credible plans to improve their lives. A New York Times/Siena College poll released this weekend hinted at the possibilities for her to grow, finding that 28% of likely voters wanted to learn more about the vice president, whereas only 9% thought the same of the Republican nominee.
Harris has clearly been thinking about how to win over those voters. She has, for example, shown more concern for their economic challenges than Biden, whose defensive statements on the unevenness of the post-pandemic recovery became a liability. Harris has vowed to crack down on what she says is “price gouging” on groceries, says she wants to help first-time home buyers with up to $25,000 in downpayment support and wants to make rent more affordable.
And in a broader sense, she is offering voters a chance to avoid the chaos, bitterness and political turbulence that raged in Trump’s first term and that his increasingly wild statements suggest would only intensify in a second.
But to succeed in the debate, the vice president faces three difficult tasks.
— She must find a balance between rebutting what her campaign expects to be a gusher of attacks and falsehoods from Trump and emphasizing her message. “I think he’s going to lie and he has a playbook that he has used in the past, be it, you know, his attacks on President Obama or Hillary Clinton,” Harris said in a radio interview on “The Rickey Smiley Morning Show” released on Monday. “What I intend to point out is what we – so many people – know, and certainly, as I’m traveling the country in this campaign, he tends to fight for himself, not for the American people.”
— Harris must also neutralize the underlying contradiction of her campaign — that she’s running as an agent of change and renewal despite being part of an unpopular administration that Trump blames for many of the problems that she is promising to fix, including high prices for groceries and housing.
In a related challenge, Harris must try to make up ground on Biden on two issues that voters say are most important to them and on which she usually trails Trump in polls: management of the economy and immigration. Trump has struggled to make effective arguments against Harris since she joined the race, but in its searing advertising campaigns, his team has accused her and Biden of causing the economic issues hurting the middle class. As Trump’s team put it in a memo on Monday, “As the chief cheerleader for Bidenomics, she needs to convince voters how Bidenomics is working despite everything being significantly more expensive than under President Trump.”
— Harris will also need to find a way to parry Trump’s certain accusations that she has flip flopped on policies that she backed during her short-lived Democratic primary run in 2019, including on fracking and the border. In seeking to explain these shifts in the CNN interview, Harris told Dana Bash that while she may have modified her approaches, her “values have not changed.” She argued, for instance, that she now believed it was possible to fight the climate crisis without banning the environmentally damaging practice of fracking, seeking to finesse her position on an issue that could hurt her in battleground Pennsylvania. The conceit, however, allowed the Trump campaign to argue she’d return to her original stance if she won power.
The former president’s team has made no attempt to hide its disdain for Harris’ political skills and clearly believes that her performance will come closer to her stumbles early in her vice presidency than her assured, but scripted, showing at the Democratic convention. Trump, for instance, insisted last week, “I’m going to let her talk.”
That was among the milder rhetoric the former president has aimed at Harris as he’s tried to further raise the heat on his rival. But Anita Dunn, a former senior Biden adviser who helped prepare the president for the June debate, said the new Democratic nominee would be ready for anything Trump throws at her.
“He will say anything – that is actually the hurdle – not to go down those rabbit holes,” Dunn told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday. “He will say anything – it may not make sense; it may be totally incoherent, but he will say it with a lot of authority. And so, making sure you know what your game plan is, what you want to say to the American people, is key,” Dunn added.
“I believe the vice president will be fully prepared to do that.”
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