For eight years, Donald J. Trump singlehandedly dominates the American political landscape. But as he prepares to debate Vice President Kamala Harris for the first time next week, the former president faces a rare moment when the spotlight will be more on his opponent than on him.
The race to define Ms. Harris has emerged as a central political battleground in the 2024 contest since she made a surprise entrance to replace President Biden in July.
Voter sentiments about Mr. Trump have hardened after a decade in the public eye. Even after impeachment, indictment, felony conviction, and attempted murder, those feelings have been effectively frozen. In comparison, Ms. Harris’s support has been shaky. Voters’ opinions of the vice president have improved suddenly and sharply nearly seven weeks into his candidacy, strengthening his position against Mr. Trump.
For Ms. Harris, Tuesday’s debate is her best chance to consolidate those gains. For Mr. Trump, it is his greatest chance to reduce or reverse them.
The event will be Mr Trump’s seventh time taking the stage at a general-election presidential debate – the most of any candidate in the modern era – while it will be Ms Harris’ debut. Strategists associated with each campaign said that means there is little new information to be gained about it and voters have a lot to learn about it.
“Voters decided on Donald Trump in 2016 and haven’t changed their mind,” said Robert Blizzard, a veteran Republican pollster. “The difference is that voters are starting to change their minds on Kamala Harris.”
The battle over who Ms. Harris is — and what she stands for — already dominates the airwaves in key swing states. Of the roughly 325,000 airings of television ads that Mr. Trump, Ms. Harris and their leading super PAC allies have paid for since she entered the race, about 95 percent have focused on her, according to a New York Times analysis of the ads. – Data tracking from AdImpact.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has sought to label Ms. Harris with a three-pronged attack of “failed, weak, dangerously liberal” and to tie the vice president to the more unpopular parts of the Biden-Harris record, particularly on immigration and the economy. . Ms. Harris’s campaign portrayed her as a tough former prosecutor on the border who understood the needs of the middle class and who would give the nation a fresh start even if her party already held the White House.
One quirk of the compressed calendar gave Ms. Harris another advantage: Democrats could use their convention to accommodate her in four days, but Republicans focused their previous convention on their rival at the time: Mr. Biden. Democrats to Mrs. Harris A candidate for change Who can reclaim traditional GOP terrain Patriotism and IndependenceEnact abortion as a fundamental right.
Back in June, the Biden campaign Telegraphy was that the president’s discussion plans Mr. Trump is only running for himself and his billionaire friends. But Mr. Biden never fully executed those lines of attack. Ms. Harris will have a chance to make that case on Tuesday.
Of the 84,937 ads aired by the Trump campaign since Ms. Harris emerged as the candidate in midweek, all but 189 have featured Ms. Harris prominently, according to AdImpact data. More than 90 percent of the ads run by Ms. Harris, meanwhile, focused heavily on her biography, her agenda, or both. The leading pro-Harris super PAC, Future Forward, has not run any outright anti-Trump ads since she began running.
The importance of the presidential debate — to which millions of Americans tune in — was underscored in June when Mr. Biden’s haphazard and halting performance raised questions about his age and eventually kicked him out of the race less than a month later.
Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia will be, by far, the longest unscripted setting for Ms. Harris’s candidacy — a high-stakes showdown against an opponent who has no regard for decorum.
Hosted by ABC News, the 90-minute debate will have the same rules and format as the one between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden in June, including muting microphones when it is not a candidate’s turn to speak, a provision that the Harris team had sought to eliminate.
The Harris team was hoping to recreate a moment like hers in 2020, when her “I’m talking” response to former Vice President Mike Pence’s interruptions became one of the most memorable moments of the encounter.
Trump’s team is eager to see that. But Mr. Mr. Trump himself has struggled to settle on his own effective anti-Harris message, cycling through a number of attacks in interviews and speeches on Harris’ character, her record, her racial identity and her shifting positions on key issues.
“He’s trying to define her and, in a very un-Trumpian way, he hasn’t succeeded,” said Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist. “First, he tried to make her a Biden. Then he tried to make her some liberal San Francisco DA he also tried the disgusting racism route. He didn’t pull any punches on him. “
Ms. Harris’s surge in favorability ratings is one of the more notable elements of her brief candidacy. She went from a net unfavorable rating – by 17 percentage points, to more voters disliking her than they liked her in early July. A polling average of 538 – now to virtually equal shares of voters who approve and disapprove of her.
Perhaps the most urgent task for Mr. Trump is to ensure that Ms. Harris engages closely with Mr. Biden on issues where he is unpopular. Mr. Trump’s most-aired television ad everAccording to data from AdImpact, Ms. Harris promoted “Bidenomics” three times during a blitz of negative economic data about gasoline prices, rising inflation and higher interest rates.
For now, Ms. Harris does not appear to be weighed down by the baggage of voter disaffection with the policies of the Biden-Harris administration. A Washington Post/ABC News poll Last month showed that only 11 percent of voters thought Ms. Harris had too much influence in the Biden administration on economic policy and 15 percent said the same about immigration — despite efforts by the Trump team to tag her as a “border czar.”
“She’s getting everything good and everything bad about being part of the administration,” said Mr. Blizzard, who polled Republican. “She doesn’t own up to the perceived failures of the Biden administration.”
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign, said Ms. Harris had bogged down the Trump campaign by making contradictory arguments that called her both ineffective and influential.
“You can’t say she did nothing and yet she was the driver of Bydenomics,” Ms Lake said. “You can’t have it both ways.”
At an event in Arizona on Wednesday, Senator J.D. Vance, Mr. Trump’s running mate, previewed the balancing act of the Trump campaign’s message, tagging Ms. Harrison as both a “radical” and a dishonest flip-flopper who had now swung toward the center. After the 2020 presidential primaries in which she veered to the left.
“She wanted to defund the police. Now, she says she doesn’t. She wanted to ban fracking. Now she says she doesn’t. It was the frontier czar who opened the American southern frontier. But now all of a sudden, she’s saying she believes in border security,” Mr. Vance said.
Mr. Vance added that he joked with Mr. Trump that Ms. Harris might show up with a long red tie because she was copying the Trump platform.
Both the Trump and Harris teams and their allies have spent heavily on television ads about immigration. A trump place A list of various crimes committed by immigrants released while Ms. Harris was District Attorney. “The victim’s blood is on his hands,” the ad concludes.
Harris’ team has used her tenure as California attorney general to bolster her tough-on-crime stance, calling her a “border-state prosecutor.” In an advertisement.
Of course, debates are often as much about impressions as they are about issues, candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, preparation and temperament.
On Thursday, Ms. Harris arrived in Pittsburgh for several days of grueling debate preparations. But she first started planning the debate months ago — before she was even a presidential candidate.
She assembled a debate team, led by Karen Dunn, a veteran Democratic lawyer. Philip Raines, who played Mr. Trump in preparation for Mrs. Clinton’s debate four years ago, was recruited as Mr. Vance’s stand-in back when he was his expected debate opponent. Now, Mr. Raines is reprising the role of Mr. Trump.
In an appearance on CNN this year, Mr. Reigns described himself as a “Daniel Day-Lewis kind of guy” that the actor inhabits his character. A post pinned above his X account is a 2016 practice debate where, while impersonating Mr. Trump, he tried to hug Mrs. Clinton.
“You want to throw everything at him,” Mr. Raines said on CNN, stressing the importance of having a candidate prepared for every eventuality.
Mr. Trump tends to prefer a more ad hoc format to prepare for the debate, batting around ideas and lines of attack with his advisers and friends. Mr. Trump remains frustrated he is running against Ms. Harris, whom he does not respect.
“He was very controlled in the Biden debate and he benefited from that,” Ms. Lake said of Mr. Trump. “The risk is that Trump can control himself.”
There’s one last reason Tuesday’s debate could be especially big. So far, that’s the only discussion the two sides have agreed to, though there have been talks with NBC about one more.
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