It feels odd to call an event only two months in the making “long-awaited,” but Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump absolutely fits the bill. Beyond the high stakes at play during their first, and potentially only, meeting this fall, there was no guarantee it was going to happen at all. There was enough back and forth about the rules that ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis will be enforcing that it was only last week that both sides committed to appearing on stage.
Harris was ultimately unsuccessful in trying to change the debate format before agreeing to appear alongside Trump. But as far as losses go, it wasn’t much of one on her part — nor is it likely to be much of a ding to her performance. Rather than trying to beat Trump within the confines of ABC’s structure, or relying on the moderators’ performance, Harris will be best served by playing an entirely different game altogether.
Harris will be best served by playing an entirely different game altogether.
At issue was whether both candidates would agree to the same rules as the June debate between President Joe Biden and Trump. Both campaigns agreed that CNN would mute the candidates’ mics when their opponent was speaking. Biden’s camp was worried it would otherwise be a repeat of the 2020 debates when Trump constantly interrupted during their boss’ answers. But Team Trump rightly realized that keeping their boss’ off-topic ramblings confined to his allotted time served them well against Biden. When Harris attempted to reverse course and let his digressions and tangents and accidental truths take center stage, his campaign pushed back hard.
Despite all the drama surrounding that fight, the decision to leave the mics off will likely have little impact on the course of the debate overall. For one, while the audience at home will not be able to easily hear Trump’s off-mic mutterings, there will be a pool of journalists who might catch a few choice remarks, a campaign staffer told NBC News. Second, Trump’s on mic mutterings aren’t particularly coherent these days, as his progressively worsening performance in June showed. And, most importantly, Harris must know that she could never count on the rules or moderators to save her, as Trump has never seen fit to follow either of them.
Debate moderators are often described as playing a similar role as umpires, calling balls and strikes but otherwise letting the teams compete against each other. Trump has opted through the years to steamroll directly over them while he rounds the bases, as though they were also challengers who must be defeated. In 2020, Chris Wallace (then of Fox News) even had to remind Trump that it was Biden he was meant to be arguing with, not him. And while Muir and Davis have been carefully branded as to appear apolitical as possible, Trump has already begun attacking the network as being “the worst network in terms of fairness.”
With that in mind, Harris will need to eschew a traditional debate mindset, one where she is primarily engaging with a potentially volatile Trump or getting into it with the moderators. Instead, the focus must be on speaking past the people in the room with her in Philadelphia and directly to the audience watching at home. If anything, Harris would be well served by modeling her performance as though she were in a courtroom, one where she is laying out the most convincing case possible against Trump returning to the White House.
Where Trump is undisciplined, swinging wildly and voicing every intrusive thought, Harris can walk the American people through the case against him with poise.
I need to acknowledge that my colleague Jarvis DeBerry has convincingly argued that there are major issues with framing the election as between a prosecutor versus a felon. But the analogy, while imperfect as a broader metaphor, provides a useful lens for Tuesday night’s matchup.
Trump’s strategy of going on the offense against Harris — seeking to undermine her favorability with undecideds and swing state voters — shows little difference from how he’s instructed his lawyers to proceed against witnesses in the many legal cases against him. He’s likewise had no issue with treating the judges overseeing his trials exactly as he has every debate moderator who’s attempted to keep him on track.
As such, Harris needs to show the moderators respect and deference, but not let them pull her too far away from the theory of the case: Trump is unfit for office and has shown as much repeatedly.
Whether she takes that message in a positive direction, highlighting how a Harris administration would better serve Americans’ lives, or negative, pointing to the disaster that Trump was as president, the core argument remains the same. Accordingly, much as it’s not the judge she had to convince during her time in court, the people that she must win over won’t be the ones asking her the questions — it’s the voters who will ultimately hand down their verdict.
With that in mind, Harris’ job isn’t to fact check every lie that comes out of Trump’s mouth, even if Muir and Davis seem content to let them pass without comment. There will surely be enough of them for her to take her pick and strategically use his words to bolster her own arguments. Where Trump is undisciplined, swinging wildly and voicing every intrusive thought, Harris can walk the American people through the case against him with poise. And unlike when she was a prosecutor, there’s no need for the jury watching the debate to be unanimous in their decision.
