Kamala Harris' joyous campaign will be hit with a blunt force of reality on Tuesday — a debate with Donald Trump — the modern era's most formidable political foe.

The vice president flipped the 2024 election after President Joe Biden's woeful debate against Trump on CNN in June led him to end his re-election bid. It restored several swing states to the electoral battleground and left Democrats dreaming of a stunning turnaround in a race most thought they were on course to lose.

Still, her success in unifying her party, casting herself as the new voice of generational change and locking horns with Trump in the polls has yet to solidify a reliable path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Indeed, if the election were held on Tuesday, the ex-president, who has already pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and numerous criminal charges, could still win.


Presidential debates don't usually decide elections — despite the cataclysmic impact of a Biden wipeout. But Tuesday night represents Harris' best remaining chance to drive home the decisive argument that could derail Trump's historic comeback.


Her task in Philadelphia will require the use of rhetorical skills that have often been called into question in the uneven vice presidency. While she had her moments in Senate debates and hearings, Harris sometimes struggled to articulate clear principles and respond under pressure in spontaneous situations. Her willingness to submit to just one major media interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, on CNN last month, only raised the bar for her performance in the only scheduled debate with Trump so far. And while the former president has now participated 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.

A wonderful contrast will be visible on stage

In her quest to become the first black and South Asian female president, Harris will find herself up close and personal for the first time with a rival who will do anything to win and who has a history of using racial and gender tropes for political gain. Trump questioned her intelligence and race as a black woman and made sexual innuendos about her on social media. But it seems that he will not let the vice president be drawn into their traps. In her interview with CNN, she declined to address Trump's racial rhetoric, dismissing it as the “same old, tired textbook,” adding: “One more question, please.

Harris has far less top-level political experience than either Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or Biden in 2016 when they faced Trump in the presidential debates. And even some members of her own party did not believe she was the strongest potential Democratic leader for the post-Biden era.

But on Tuesday, Harris has a chance to change the perception of his political acumen and lay down a marker for the Nov. 5 sprint.

The campaign, which aimed to avoid mistakes and limit unauthorized public exposure of the vice president, is facing prime time with nowhere to hide. And the cost of failure is huge — how it could put a powerful ex-president who tried to subvert American democracy after the 2020 election on a path to a new presidency dedicated to "retribution." The stakes for Democrats were raised Saturday as Trump vowed in a social media post to prosecute and jail election officials, political opponents, donors and others he believes "rigged" the election as he made yet more false allegations. that resulted in his loss in 2020. about voter fraud.

How could Harris win?

Still, if Harris can withstand the pressure and look down on Trump's onslaught, the debate offers significant opportunities for her — potentially more than those open to Trump, who is already a known love-him-or-hate-him mogul.

A successful appearance Tuesday night could provide a platform for the vice president to convince undecided voters in swing states that she has credible plans to improve their lives. A New York Times/Siena College poll released this weekend hinted at her upside potential, finding that 28% of likely voters want to know more about the vice president, while only 9% feel the same way about the Republican nominee.

Harris clearly thought about how to win over those voters. For example, she has shown more interest in their economic problems than Biden, whose defensive statements about the unevenness of the post-pandemic recovery have become binding. Harris has pledged to crack down on what she says is "price gouging" in groceries, says she wants to help first-time home buyers with up to a $25,000 down payment and wants to make rents more affordable.

And more broadly, it offers voters a chance to avoid the chaos, bitterness and political turmoil that raged in Trump's first term and which his increasingly wild statements suggest will intensify in his second.

Haris to be 'fully prepared'

However, in order for the vice-president to succeed in the debate, he faces three difficult tasks.

— She must strike a balance between rebutting what her campaign expects to be a barrage of attacks and lies from Trump and emphasizing her message. "I think he's going to lie and he has a playbook that he's used in the past, whether it was his attacks on President Obama or Hillary Clinton," Harris said in a radio interview on The Rickey Smiley Morning Show that aired Monday. "I want to point out what we -- so much -- know, and certainly as I travel the country on this campaign, he tends to fight for himself, not for the American people."

Harris must also neutralize a major contradiction of her campaign — that she is running as an agent of change and renewal despite being part of an unpopular administration that Trump blames for many of the problems he promises to fix, including high food and housing prices. .

In a related challenge, Harris must try to match Biden on the two issues voters say are most important to them and on which she typically trails Trump in the polls: managing the economy and immigration. Trump has tried to make an effective case against Harris since she entered the race, but in his scorching ad campaigns, his team has accused her and Biden of creating economic problems that hurt the middle class. As the Trump team said in a memo Monday, “As the chief cheerleader for Bidenomics, she needs to convince voters how Bidenomics works, even if everything is significantly more expensive than under President Trump.

Harris will also have to find a way to fend off some of Trump's accusations that she has backed away from policies she supported during her brief run in the 2019 Democratic primary, including fracking and the border. Trying to explain these shifts in an interview with CNN, Harris told Dana Bash that while she may have adjusted her approaches, her "values haven't changed." For example, she said she now believes it's possible to fight the climate crisis without banning the environmentally damaging practice of fracking, and sought to clarify her position on an issue that could hurt her on the battlefield in Pennsylvania. However, this conceit has allowed the Trump campaign to claim that if he wins power, he will return to his original position.

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