Trump, Harris Reach for Game-Changing Moment in Key Debate

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris enter Tuesday’s debate in search of the same goal – a moment that will help them gain the edge in a race polls show is essentially tied.

The challenges each faces to secure that edge are starkly different as they take the stage in Philadelphia at 9 p.m. local time, potentially their only face-to-face showdown with less than two months until Election Day.

Trump in his third run for the presidency is a well-defined, albeit polarizing figure, for voters. Some allies want to see him focus on policy and avoid personal attacks, holding out hope he can demonstrate presidential behavior and ease concerns among voters over returning the former president and now convicted felon to power.

For Harris, the challenge is to address concerns from voters who say they don’t know enough about her or her policies, and for those skeptical President Joe Biden’s No. 2 can be an agent for change. Millions of Americans are expected to watch, making the debate her best chance to define her image.

Voters are “not just putting Kamala Harris under a microscope, they’re looking again at Donald Trump,” said Democratic pollster John Anzalone, a veteran of Hillary Clinton and Biden’s campaigns.

While unlikely to be as immediately consequential as the June matchup between Biden and Trump that ended the president’s political career, the debate is poised to shift the trajectory of the race with just days until early voting starts in some states. Trump and Harris are both searching to gain a convincing lead in battleground polls and a strong performance, or weak one, could make the difference. 

Harris wants to come off as a highly competent, political moderate adept at managing someone as impulsive as Trump. Trump aims to cast Harris as too liberal and tie her to unpopular administration policies, while his aides hope he avoids attacks over her intellect and identity that have repelled some voters.

Earlier: Harris, Trump Face Off in Key Presidential Debate: What to Watch

Polling suggests Harris’ task may be more critical to her electoral viability. In a New York Times/Siena College poll released Sunday, 28% of likely voters said they needed to know more about her, while just 9% said that of Trump. 

More than six in 10 said the next president should represent a major change from Biden, a difficult task for his second-in-command, even as her campaign tries to portray Harris as a youthful change agent. A policy page on Harris’ website Monday was headlined “A New Way Forward.” Just a quarter of those surveyed in the poll said Harris represented that change, while 53% said Trump did.

Democratic strategist Karen Finney said the juxtaposition on stage, with a 59-year-old, Black and Asian-American woman facing a 78-year-old white man, helps Harris.

“When you think about the future versus the past, the contrast is going to be pretty blaring,” Finney said. “How does Trump do against a younger person who’s able to do a real debate?”

Finney hopes the comparison will make Trump’s age and acuity a bigger hurdle for voters. 

“Is this the moment we start talking about Trump’s age and that his nonsensical statements maybe aren’t just because he’s wacky?” she said. 

Trump has a chance to be the one defining Harris. He’s taken to calling his opponent “Comrade Kamala” and describing her as a socialist, Marxist and fascist. Polls find more voters see her as too liberal than those who see him as too conservative. 

His advisers hope Trump sharpens that message, tying the vice president to the administration’s record on the economy, immigration and certain foreign policy issues, areas where Trump holds an advantage in swing-state polls.

“President Trump has a unique opportunity to outline two competing records in the executive branch and two competing visions,” said Hogan Gidley, a principal deputy press secretary in Trump’s White House. “He can tout his record that made peoples’ lives better and also expose Kamala Harris’ that made them worse.”

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Harris will look for opportunities to let Trump damage himself. 

“He plays from this really old and tired playbook,” Harris told radio host Rickey Smiley in an interview aired Monday. “There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go, and we should be prepared.”

To knock Hillary Clinton off-balance at a 2016 debate, Trump invited women who’d leveled sexual assault and harassment accusations against former President Bill Clinton to sit in the audience.

“I hope part of her strategy is to not correct every crazy thing he says, to get out of the way and let him be who he is,” Finney said. 

To unnerve Trump, Harris’ campaign is bringing aides-turned-critics to the debate: ex-White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, and Olivia Troye, a former national security official. The campaign also unveiled an ad featuring former President Barack Obama ridiculing Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes.

Trump will have a host of surrogates at the debate, including running mate JD Vance, Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley and co-chair Lara Trump.

Trump is notoriously impulsive and Harris’ past as a prosecutor suggests she’ll be eager to dissect any false claims he makes. 

“We should be prepared for the fact that he is probably going to speak a lot of untruths,” she told Smiley. 

Gidley said Harris’ preparation could backfire, coming off as “smug and weak” to some voters. “I expect her to have a bunch of rehearsed stories, performance art, moments where she stares into the camera, has perfect pauses and tries to eviscerate Donald Trump,” he said. 

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former Trump White House press secretary, said he would be “game-time ready.”

“That’s why you’re hearing so much about the preparation for Vice President Harris, because this isn’t something she does very often,” she said on ABC’s This Week. “She has a lot to get ready for.”

The safe prediction is to expect the unexpected.

When Trump’s onstage, “nothing is ever normal,” Anzalone said.

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