For eight years, Donald Trump has single-handedly dominated 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 is far more on his opponent than on him.
The race to define Harris has emerged as a central political battleground in the 2024 race since his surprise run to replace President Joe Biden in July.
Voters’ opinions about Trump have hardened after a decade in the public eye. Even after impeachment, indictment, criminal conviction, and attempted assassination, these feelings have been effectively frozen. By comparison, Harris’ support has been shaky. Voters’ views of the vice president have improved suddenly and sharply in the nearly seven weeks since his candidacy, strengthening his position against Trump.
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For Harris, the debate on Tuesday is his best chance to consolidate those gains. For Trump, it is his biggest opportunity to undercut or reverse them.
The event will be Trump’s seventh time taking the stage in a general presidential debate — the most of any candidate in modern times — and Harris’ debut. Strategists associated with each campaign said that means there is little new information about him and voters have a lot to learn about him.
“Voters decided on Donald Trump in 2016 and they haven’t changed their minds,” said Robert Blizzard, a veteran Republican pollster. “The difference is that voters are starting to change their minds about Kamala Harris.”
The battle over who Harris is — and what he stands for — has already dominated the airwaves in key swing spaces. According to a New York Times ad-tracking analysis, of the roughly 325,000 television commercials paid for by Trump, Harris and their top PPAC allies since he entered the race, about 95% have focused on him. AdImpact data.
Trump’s campaign has sought to brand Harris as a “failed, weak, dangerously liberal” in a three-pronged attack, tying Vice President Biden-Harris to unpopular parts of the record, particularly on immigration and the economy. Harris’s campaign has cast him as a hard-line former prosecutor who understands the needs of the middle class and would offer the nation a fresh start even if his party were already in the White House.
The quirk of the packed calendar gave Harris another benefit: Democrats were able to use their convention to frame him favorably over four days, but Republicans focused their earlier convention on their then-rival: Biden. Democrats chose Harris as a change candidate who could reclaim the traditional GOP terrain of patriotism and freedom and make abortion a basic right.
In June, Biden’s campaign had aired that the president’s debate plans included attacking Trump as only running for himself and his billionaire friends. But Biden never fully implemented these lines of attack. Harris has a chance to make the case on Tuesday.
Of the 84,937 ads the Trump campaign has aired since Harris’ nomination through midweek, all but 189 have featured Harris prominently, according to data from AdImpact. More than 90% of Harris’ ads, meanwhile, have focused heavily on his biography, agenda, or both. The leading pro-Harris super PAC, Future Forward, hasn’t run any purely anti-Trump ads since he started.
The importance of the presidential debate — attended by tens of millions of Americans — was underscored in June when Biden’s meandering and halting performance raised questions about his age and ultimately ousted him from the race less than a month later.
Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia will be by far the longest unscripted event for Harris of his candidacy — a high-stakes showdown against an opponent with little regard for civility.
The 90-minute debate, hosted by ABC News, will follow the same rules and format as the one between Trump and Biden in June, including muting microphones when it’s not the candidate’s turn to speak. That’s what the Harris team had been aiming for. remove.
The Harris team had hoped to recreate the kind of moment he had in 2020, when his “I’m talking” rhetoric interrupting former Vice President Mike Pence became one of the most memorable moments of that encounter.
Trump’s team is eager to see that Harris nailed his speech. But Trump himself has struggled to adjust to his own powerful anti-Harris message, going through a series of attacks in interviews and speeches about Harris’ character, his record, his racial identity and his shifting positions on key issues.
“He’s tried to define him, and in a very un-Trump way, he’s failed,” said Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist. “First he tried to make him Biden. Then he tried to make him the liberal San Francisco DA. He even tried the horrific racism route. He hasn’t hit him.”
The jump in Harris’ favorable ratings has been one of the most significant elements of his brief candidacy. He went from a net unfavorable rating — 17 percentage points, more voters disliked him than liked him, according to a polling average of 538 in early July — to a nearly equal share of voters who approve and disapprove of him now.
Perhaps Trump’s most pressing task is to ensure that Harris stays in close contact with Biden on issues where he is unpopular. In Trump’s most-aired television ad to date, Harris touts “Bidenomics” three times amid negative economic statistics about gasoline prices, rising inflation and high interest rates, according to AdImpact data.
So far, Harris hasn’t seemed to weigh in on voter dissatisfaction with the policies of the Biden-Harris administration. A Washington Post/ABC News poll last month found that only 11% of voters believed Harris had much influence in the Biden administration on economic policy, and 15% said the same on immigration, despite the Trump team’s efforts to label him a “border islander.”
“He gets all the good points and none of the bad points of being part of the administration,” Blizzard said. “He 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 Trump’s campaign faltered because it made conflicting arguments in calling Harris both ineffective and influential.
“You can’t say he did nothing, but he was still the driver of Bidenomics,” Lake said. “You can’t have it both ways.”
At an event in Arizona on Wednesday, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s running mate, presented a rebalancing of Trump’s campaign message, labeling Harris both a “radical” and an inauthentic flip-flop who was now turning toward Trump. to the center after the 2020 presidential primaries, in which he veered to the left.
“He wanted to defund the police. Now he says he won’t. He wanted to ban fracking. Now he says he hasn’t. He was the border czar who opened America’s southern border. But now all of a sudden he says he believes in border security,” Vance said.
Vance added that he joked with Trump that Harris might appear in an elongated red tie now that he’s mimicking Trump’s platform.
Both the Trump and Harris teams and their allies have spent heavily on television ads about immigration, with one Trump spot listing various crimes by immigrants who were acquitted while Harris was district attorney. “The victim’s blood is on his hands,” the ad concludes.
The Harris team has used his tenure as California attorney general to bolster his tough-on-crime record, calling him a “border state prosecutor” in one ad.
Of course, debates are often about impressions as much as things, voters’ sense of a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, readiness and character.
On Thursday, Harris arrived in Pittsburgh for several days of rigorous debate preparation. But he first started planning the debate months ago — before he was even a presidential candidate.
He assembled a discussion group led by veteran Democratic lawyer Karen Dunn. Philippe Reines, who played Trump in Hillary Clinton’s debate preparations four years ago, was recruited to be Vance’s running mate when she was his expected debate opponent. Now Reines is taking on Trump’s role again.
During an appearance on CNN this year, Reines described himself as a “Daniel Day-Lewis kind of guy” in regards to the actor who inhabits his character. The post pinned to his X account is a practice chat from 2016 where he tried to hug Clinton while playing Trump.
“You want to throw everything at them,” Reines said on CNN, stressing the importance of preparing a candidate for every possibility.
Trump tends to favor an ad hoc format to prepare for debates, hammering out ideas and lines of attack with his advisers and friends. Trump remains bitter that he is running against Harris, whom he has made clear he has no respect for.
“He was very controlled in the Biden debate and he benefited from it,” Lake said of Trump. “The risk is whether Trump can control himself.”
There is one final reason why Tuesday’s debate may be particularly wide-ranging. So far, that’s the only talk the two sides have agreed to, though there’s one more in talks with NBC.
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