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Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will talk for the first time on Tuesday evening.
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Their meeting will come to a critical point in the very close competition of 2024.
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This is also Harris and Trump’s first time in the same room.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump face off tonight in a pivotal moment that could make the 2024 race exceptionally close.
It will be the first time Harris and Trump have met in person, a reminder of how dramatically the race has changed since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July.
Harris participates the most in the discussion. Polls show that undecided voters want to know more about him and already know enough about the former president. He cut into Trump’s lead over the summer, but his once clear momentum appears to be stalling. The race is very tight in the few swing states that decide the election.
Since Tuesday, only one state, Wisconsin, where Harris leads, has more than a 2-point gap between the pair in The Washington Post’s polling average. Election prognosticator Nate Silver currently gives Trump a more than 60 percent chance of winning the election. The advantage, he says, comes from the sheer closeness of the national race and the difficulty Democrats face in winning the Electoral College.
Both sides have hinted at their strategy ahead of the encounter. Trump’s campaign has made clear it wants to tie Harris to Biden, hoping that widespread voter frustration with the nation will weigh him down. Harris’ campaign had made it clear they wanted to get under Trump’s skin, hoping to provoke a viral moment that would further deepen the already wide gender gap between the two candidates.
Here are some important facts you need to know ahead of Tuesday night’s debate.
When is it and how can I watch it?
The first conversation between Harris and Trump is Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET. ABC News will host the debate, but the other major networks will provide simulcasts. The debate will be broadcast on ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu. You don’t even need a cable subscription to ABC News Live, which you can access here.
The talk lasts 90 minutes and includes two commercial breaks.
Who are the moderators?
David Muir, anchor of ABC’s flagship “World News Tonight,” and Linsey Davis, who anchors the Sunday edition of “World News Tonight,” are moderates. Both reporters have moderated presidential primaries before, but this is their first general election debate.
Mute the microphones?
Yes. Harris’ campaign confirmed in a letter to ABC News that it accepts the candidate’s microphone being muted when it’s not her turn to speak.
“Vice President Harris, a former prosecutor, is substantially disadvantaged by this format, which shields Donald Trump from direct conversation with the vice president,” Harris’ campaign wrote in a letter to ABC.
In the end, the vice president’s campaign said they adopted the rules so they wouldn’t “jeopardize the debate.”
How would this be different?
Like June’s Biden-Trump debate, this showdown is fundamentally different from any major modern presidential debate. That’s because both campaigns agreed to stiff-arm the Commission on Presidential Debates, the bipartisan group that organized presidential debates for decades. Republicans resigned from the debate commission in 2022, but Biden’s campaign delivered the final blow. As in June, no live audience either. Biden’s campaign said in May that muting the microphones and blacking out the audience would return the presidential debates to an acceptable level — almost everyone agrees that the first debate of 2020 was an abject disaster because Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden.
What questions can we expect?
Only Muir, Davis and probably a very few select people at ABC News know the exact questions. Unlike some past presidential debates, the evening will not have a theme. Regardless, it’s a virtual guarantee that economic issues will dominate the evening.
Polls have consistently shown that voters see the economy as the biggest issue in the election. But recently, Harris has chipped away at Trump’s once-wide interest on the subject. In late August, a Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump had an advantage of about eight percentage points when voters were asked who would best manage the economy. He also had a 5 point lead due to better control of inflation. His margins are good, but nowhere near the 20-point lead he once had over President Joe Biden on both issues late last year.
Harris has published a handful of financial plans. He has proposed up to $25,000 for first-time home buyers, a possible $50,000 tax credit for small business owners, and even broke with Biden by proposing a 28 percent capital gains tax rate for Americans making at least $1 million, lower than the White House’s proposed top rate of 39.6 percent on capital gains.
Trump presented his economic agenda in a speech to the New York Economic Club on Thursday. He promises to cut regulations and hopes in large part to tap into voters’ nostalgia for the pre-COVID-19 economy he oversaw. Trump also announced his support for a quasi-U.S. sovereign wealth fund, although he provided few details about its operations.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs recently concluded that Harris’ plans would grow the US economy more. Although Trump, especially a return to his tariff-led trade policy, would lead to a slight contraction of the economy.
What is Trump’s approach?
Trump wants to squelch Harris’ momentum by portraying his rush to the center as nonsensical. He’s also trying to brand him as a communist, going back to the long-standing GOP tactic of invoking the red scare. Just as he did before facing off against Biden, the former president has also used the early stages of the debate to trash ABC News. Trump is known for what the sports world calls “working the referees,” but his attacks also lay the groundwork for him to dismiss the entire debate as fake if it doesn’t go well. Trump has repeatedly said CNN was fair during the June debate after his allies questioned whether the network could be impartial.
Trump has taken specific shots at “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos, even though the former Clinton aide is not one of the two moderators.
How will Harris try to win?
Harris is broadcasting that he wants to end the debate in a formal moment, similar to when he told Vice President Mike Pence, “Mr. Vice President, I’m talking,” when addressing him during the 2020 vice presidential debate. Harris reminded supporters of the incident in a fundraising message, “Do you remember this,” which included a gif of the moment. Reuters reports that Harris’ team “believes that many will watch the debate as video clips on social media platforms.”
He has spent the last few days in Pittsburgh holding a mini debate prep camp. Former Clinton aide Philippe Reines will play Trump in the mock debates, a role he also filled for Clinton in 2016.
What happens after the conversation?
The party’s main vice presidential candidates, Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will debate on October 1 in New York. CBS News hosts this discussion. Trump and Harris are also likely to talk again next month, although those details are still being finalized.
Voters will also be able to vote soon. North Carolina began mailing ballots Friday. Pennsylvania, the biggest swing state of all time, begins in-person early voting on September 16.
Read the original article on Business Insider
