CNN
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Kamala Harris’ joyful campaign will be confronted on Tuesday with the brutal force of reality: a debate with Donald Trump, the most threatening political opponent of modern times.

The vice president has transformed the 2024 election after President Joe Biden’s unsuccessful debate drama against Trump on CNN in June caused him to abandon his re-election bid. She has brought several swing states back on the ballot and given Democrats dreams of a surprise turnaround in a race most thought they would lose.

But her success in uniting her party, positioning herself as a fresh voice of generational change and her neck-and-neck race with Trump in the polls have so far not given her a reliable path to the 270 electoral votes she needs to win the presidential election. If the election were held on Tuesday, the former president, who has already averted an assassination attempt and numerous charges, could still win.

Presidential debates don’t usually decide elections — despite the devastating impact of Biden’s defeat — but Tuesday night is Harris’ best remaining chance to make a decisive argument that could thwart Trump’s historic comeback.

Her assignment in Philadelphia will require the use of rhetorical skills that have often been challenged in a fractious vice presidency. Although she has had her moments in debates and Senate hearings, Harris has sometimes struggled to articulate clear policies and responses under pressure in impromptu situations. Her willingness to submit to only one major media interview since being nominated as the Democratic nominee last month, on CNN, has only raised the bar for her performance in the only scheduled debate with Trump so far. And although the former president has now participated in presidential debates in three different elections, this will be Harris’ first foray onto the debate stage since meeting former Vice President Mike Pence in 2020.

Harris is seeking to become the first black woman and South Asian president, and will face a close-quarter rival for the first time with a rival who will do anything to win and who has a history of exploiting racial and gender stereotypes for political gain. Trump has questioned her intelligence and her race as a black woman and has made sexual innuendos about her on social media. But the vice president seems determined not to fall into his traps. In her CNN interview, she refused to address Trump’s racist rhetoric, dismissing it as “the same old, tired maneuver,” adding, “Next question, please.”

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

But on Tuesday, Harris has a chance to change the perception of her political acumen and send a signal for the final sprint to November 5.

A campaign that has been about avoiding mistakes and limiting unanticipated public appearances by the vice president is facing a prime-time television moment from which he can no longer hide. And the cost of failure is enormous — because it could set an ex-president who was a strongman and sought to undermine U.S. democracy after the 2020 election on the path to a new presidency bent on “retribution.” What’s at stake for Democrats was made clear Saturday when Trump vowed in a social media post to prosecute and imprison election officials, political opponents, donors and others he says “cheated” in the election, while making further untrue allegations that his 2020 defeat was the result of voter fraud.

If Harris can withstand the pressure and withstand Trump’s attacks, the debate still offers her significant opportunities – perhaps more than Trump, who is already a known quantity that people either love or hate.

A successful performance Tuesday night could give the vice president a platform to convince undecided voters in key swing states that she has credible plans to improve their lives. A New York Times/Siena College poll released over the weekend suggested her potential for growth, finding that 28 percent of likely voters wanted to know more about the vice president, while only 9 percent thought that of the Republican nominee.

Harris has clearly thought about how to win over those voters. For example, she has shown more concern for the economic challenges of those voters than Biden, whose defensive statements about the uneven post-pandemic recovery have proven a liability. Harris has vowed to crack down on what she sees as “price gouging” on food, says she wants to help first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 in down payment assistance and make rents more affordable.

And more broadly, it offers voters a chance to escape the chaos, bitterness and political turmoil that raged during Trump’s first term and that – as his increasingly wild statements suggest – would worsen in a second.

However, to be successful in the debate, the Vice President faces three difficult tasks.

– She must find a balance between refuting what her campaign expects to be a barrage of attacks and falsehoods from Trump and emphasizing her message. “I believe he will lie, and he has a script that he has used in the past, whether it was, you know, his attacks on President Obama or Hillary Clinton,” Harris said in a radio interview on the “Rickey Smiley Morning Show” released Monday. “I want to point out what we – so many people – know, and as I travel around the country on this campaign, he certainly tends to fight for himself, not for the American people.”

– Harris must also neutralise the fundamental contradiction of her campaign: that she is running as an agent of change and renewal despite being part of an unpopular administration that blames Trump for many of the problems it promises to solve, including high food and housing prices.

In a related challenge, Harris must try to catch up with Biden on two issues that voters care about most and on which she typically trails Trump in polls: economic governance and immigration. Trump has struggled to make effective arguments against Harris since she entered the race, but in his sharp advertising campaigns, his team has blamed her and Biden for causing the economic problems that are hurting the middle class. As Trump’s team put it in a memo Monday, “As the chief cheerleader of Bidenomics, she must convince voters that Bidenomics works, even though everything is significantly more expensive than under President Trump.”

— Harris must also find a way to fend off Trump’s accusations that she has changed policy views she supported during her short-lived 2019 primary, including on fracking and the border. When she tried to explain those differences in the CNN interview, Harris told Dana Bash that while she had changed her approaches, her “values ​​have not changed.” She argued, for example, that she now believes it is possible to combat the climate crisis without banning the environmentally damaging practice of fracking and sought to refine her position on an issue that could hurt her in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. But that conceit allowed the Trump campaign to argue that she would return to her original stance if she won power.

The former president’s team has made no attempt to hide its disdain for Harris’ political skills, evidently believing that her performance is more reminiscent of her stumbles at the start of her vice presidency than her confident but staged appearance at the Democratic National Convention. Trump, for example, insisted last week: “I’ll let her talk.”

That was some of the milder rhetoric the former president directed at Harris to further increase pressure on his rival. But Anita Dunn, a former senior adviser to Biden who prepared the president for the June debate, said the new Democratic nominee was prepared for whatever Trump would throw at her.

“He’s going to say anything — that’s really the hurdle — not getting caught up in those rabbit holes,” Dunn told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday. “He’s going to say anything — it may not make sense, it may be completely incoherent, but he’s going to say it with great authority. That’s why it’s critical to make sure you know your plan, what you’re going to say to the American people,” Dunn added.

“I think the vice president will be perfectly willing to do that.”