Author: Peter Nicholas (Senior White House reporter for NBC News)
PHILADELPHIA (NBC News) – The presidential debate in June pitted Donald Trump against an enfeebled Joe Biden, who flopped so badly that he was forced to drop out of the race.
The sequel unfolds Tuesday night in Philadelphia, with a much younger Kamala Harris hoping to flip the script and expose Trump as the aging candidate unfit to lead.
Trump faces a different challenge. Will he be disciplined enough to forgo the familiar insults and gripes that risk pushing away voters who aren’t part of his loyal base? Can he stick to issues and possibly gain ground by painting Harris as a flip-flopper for having changed her stances on health care and energy policies?
For both candidates, the debate hosted by ABC News may be the best chance to seize the advantage in a campaign that polls show is a tossup. The debate starts at 9 p.m. ET, and millions will be watching. There is no bigger stage during the eight-week sprint to Election Day.
In a bit of symbolism, the contest will take place at the National Constitution Center. With both parties contending that the nation’s future is at stake — that 2024 could be its last election, depending on the outcome — it seems fitting that the candidates will meet in a place that celebrates the ideal of self-government.
“Does she reassure people and continue to introduce herself” to the country? asked Robert Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas. “Does he do something that is either beyond the pale, or does he have a meltdown where he is incoherent? Those are really the stakes.”
Here’s what to look for in the 90-minute event:
Is there enough time for Harris to accomplish all that she needs?
Harris has a lot of work to do. She succeeded Biden at the top of the ticket in July, and she’s still introducing herself to many Americans who know little about her. A New York Times-Siena College poll that interviewed nearly 1,700 likely voters last week found that 28% still want to learn more about Harris. For Trump, a household name for decades, the figure was only 9%.
The debate offers one of the biggest opportunities to fill in the gaps. Harris has been stressing her commonality with everyday Americans. Expect her to explain not only her work as the attorney general of California, but also her modest roots as the daughter of a single mother who struggled to buy a home for the family.
Beyond that, Harris needs time to take the fight directly to Trump. Stumbling over his words, Biden couldn’t pull that off. Harris should prove more skillful. She is a former prosecutor who proved more than a match for Mike Pence when she faced him in the vice presidential debate in 2020. “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking. I’m speaking,” she said, polite but firm when Pence tried to cut her off.
In mounting an attack against Trump, Harris can pick and choose from a Golden Corral-scale buffet of material. There was Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. There’s his criminal conviction in Manhattan this year for falsifying business records. Or his 2022 contention that the Constitution’s provisions can be “terminated” because of what he baselessly claimed was widespread voter fraud in his re-election bid (Trump later wrote a post denying that he wanted to do away with the Constitution).
Harris’ toughest test may be parrying Trump’s taunts. He has referred to her as “nasty” and “dumb as a rock.” Last month, he reposted a vulgar message implying that she’d used sex to advance her career.
Harris has studied carefully, working with aides at a hotel in Pittsburgh. But no amount of work can quite prepare a candidate for a debater as unpredictable as Trump.
“I suspect there will be some surprises during the debate,” Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesman, said Monday while briefing reporters.
A former aide to Hillary Clinton, Philippe Reines, has been playing Trump in mock debates, reprising his role during Clinton’s prep work in 2016. In an interview before Biden left the race, Reines talked frankly about what it’s like to stand in for Trump. At first, he said, he considered reading briefing papers to familiarize himself with Trump’s positions.
Then he decided: “F— this. Trump’s not reading any paper; I’m not going to read any paper. I rationalized it as if I really get into character here, I’m not going to do anything he’s not,” he said.
Will Trump speak more broadly beyond his base?
This will be Trump’s seventh general election presidential debate since 2016; it’s Harris’ first. Trump’s performances through the years have been spotty. Even when he knocked Biden out of the race in the last debate, Trump didn’t inspire key voting blocs. Dial testing that measured viewers’ reactions in real time found that independent voters — a prized constituency — agreed with Biden’s assertion that Trump has the “morals of an alley cat.”
Trump kept his composure for much of that debate, however, and he’ll need to do it again this time if he’s to win over suburban women, independent and undecided voters who may only now be focusing on the race. A promising line of attack for Trump may be the economy. Even though the inflation rate has been cooling, prices are still about 20% higher than they were when Biden and Harris took office.
Another potential vulnerability that Trump may exploit is Harris’ record as a prosecutor. As district attorney of San Francisco, she didn’t seek the death penalty for a gang member charged with killing a police officer, citing her opposition to capital punishment.
Trump allies mentioned the case during their pre-debate briefing with reporters.
“Kamala is not some new arrival in American politics. She has a record as a district attorney and as attorney general,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. “That record is dangerously liberal, and President Trump is going to tie her to that record during the debate.”
There is little doubt that at some point, Trump will deviate from issues and personalize the contest. It’s just a question of when and to what degree. Trump gets especially caustic when he’s challenged. That Harris is both a woman and a minority could “trigger” him in ways that repel a good chunk of viewers, said Rowland, the Kansas professor.
“There’s a real danger that he is even less controlled than normal because of who she is,” he said, adding that Trump “cannot afford to lose any more college-educated women.”
Asked about Trump’s tone in debating women, one of his allies said there would be no difference from the way he confronts male opponents.
Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who is informally advising Trump on the debate, said at the campaign’s news briefing: “President Trump respects women and doesn’t feel the need to be patronizing or speak to women in any other way he would speak to a man.”
Pity the moderators
ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis will be moderating, and Trump has already telegraphed he’s unhappy with the arrangement.
In the run-up, he called ABC the “worst network in terms of fairness.” Still, he won a victory of sorts when Harris agreed to take part even though she had objected to a rule that when it’s not a candidate’s turn to speak, the microphone is muted. She had wanted the microphones turned on throughout — a reversal from Biden’s preference.
ABC will still have the discretion to turn on both mics during a sustained back-and-forth.
An open question is whether the moderators will try to fact-check the candidates in real time or let them speak freely and leave it to others to sort out who told the truth or not.
For the moderators, no amount of preparation may suffice.
“With Trump, when the moderators say, ‘OK, in this next section we’re going to talk about Social Security,’ good luck with that,” Reines said. “He’s going to talk about what he wants. It’s possible that any answer becomes a melee. You can’t simulate that.”
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