Kamala Harris faces a crucial debate against Donald Trump next Tuesday in Philadelphia, a pivotal moment as her lead in the presidential race narrows. With no other debates scheduled, this clash could shift the campaign dynamics.
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By James Politi in Washington and Lauren Fedor in Pittsburgh
Surveys show voters are unsure of where the Democrat stands on issues ahead of Tuesday’s face-off with Trump ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Kamala Harris is under pressure to put on a strong performance during her debate against Donald Trump next week after polling suggested her momentum in the presidential contest could be fading.
The clash in Philadelphia on Tuesday night will be the first — and could be the last — between Harris and Trump. No other debates have been scheduled before the November vote between the two rivals for the White House.
Both campaigns know the face-off could be a new inflection point in a race that has already featured a succession of sudden twists, starting with the dramatic implosion of Joe Biden’s re-election bid following his disastrous June debate against Trump.
Harris will be more in the spotlight since she is less known than Trump to American voters. Her lead in the contest has shrunk slightly to 2.9 percentage points in recent weeks, according to the Financial Times national poll tracker, suggesting she has received no extra boost from the Democratic party convention in Chicago. The closely watched national New York Times/Siena poll released on Sunday showed Trump ahead by 1 percentage point, meaning the race is essentially tied.
A CBS News/YouGov poll also showed the race neck-and-neck in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Democrats said Harris faced the challenge of introducing herself to Americans who are unfamiliar with her policies but are open to voting for her.
“I think that if Harris shows that she can do in an impromptu environment what she’s done successfully in a relatively scripted way, that will help her, if not decisively then substantially” said Matt Bennett, a Democratic strategist at centre-left think-tank Third Way. “The problem for Harris is that expectations of Trump are so low. He is always chaotic. He is always bombastic, and he’s going to be that.”
Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic strategist, said a top priority for Harris would be to “define herself as change”. He also said the vice-president needed to “prosecute Trump rather than defend Biden” and “show her youth, vigour, new ideas and cast Trump as old, stale, backward-looking”.
Harris chose to prepare for the debate at a hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, an industrial city in western Pennsylvania that could be crucial to the election’s outcome.
While she has given few hints of how she will approach Trump, Harris said during a visit to a spice shop on Saturday that she was ready for the showdown. Her message on Tuesday would be that “it’s time to turn the page on the divisiveness, it’s time to bring our country together [and] chart a new way forward”, she told the small crowd.
Even though Harris is known for being a good debater, Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said taking on Trump would not be simple and she should not allow herself to be provoked.
“She basically needs to ignore him. Don’t let him get her goat. Don’t let him fluster her,” he said. “[But] when he is saying rude or ridiculous things, give it to him.”
Rendell added: “Voters want to see, especially with a woman candidate, they want to see a woman who can handle herself, who isn’t going to get cowed, who isn’t going to get bowled over.”
Trump is said to have enlisted Matt Gaetz, the hardline Florida Republican congressman, and Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman, to help him prepare for the debate.
As he often does, Trump has been attacking the hosts of the event at ABC News, suggesting they would be biased against him. He has also resisted a push by Harris to allow microphones to be open throughout the debate, rather than muted, when the other candidate is speaking.
But Trump is not doing what mainstream Republicans and party strategists say he should, which is to focus on issues such as inflation and immigration, in which they believe Harris is vulnerable.
On Friday, he called a press conference in New York City but failed to take questions and spent the time railing against his legal troubles and even his own lawyers. After a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday evening, he went on social media to deliver a threat to seek long prison sentences for “those people that cheated” in the counting of votes in this year’s election.
Harris is not underestimating Trump, however. “We fully expect Donald Trump is going to be ready for the debate. He’s a showman,” said one of the vice-president’s campaign aides, noting that this would be his seventh general election presidential debate, compared with Harris’s first.
Her aim would be to show a clear contrast for voters, the aide said.
“The goal of this debate is to see the choice between vice-president Harris, who is going to set out a vision to make our lives better, to increase economic opportunity, protect our freedoms, and Trump, who is going to be pushing a dark, backwards-looking agenda and is only focused on himself,” the aide said.
Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist at Penta Group, said Harris “still largely remains a blank slate for a lot of voters”.
“Can she offer a concrete vision for the future?” he said. “Can she define her candidacy beyond the shadow of being Biden’s vice-president?”
Amy Walter, the top political analyst at the non-partisan Cook Political Report, wrote in a note this month: “For Harris, success means reassuring swing voters that she isn’t as ‘extreme’ or ‘radically liberal’ as Trump and his allies have suggested. There’s little chance that voters’ opinions of Trump will change. Instead, the big question is whether it impacts the way voters perceive Harris.”
Read also:
- 🔒 What Kamala Harris had to say in her first post-nomination interview
- 🔒 The Economist – Can Kamala Harris win?
- Global leaders size up Kamala Harris’s rise, brace for Trump victory
© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd.
