Stand firm, but don’t take the bait. Be prepared, but don’t follow a script. Challenge him, but don’t lose your nerve. Stand by your identity, but don’t let it guide you.
As Kamala Harris prepares to face Donald Trump in a debate tonight for the first and possibly only time in her abbreviated presidential campaign, Democrats who have advised previous candidates have plenty of advice on how she should handle an opponent whose key political skill is to attack and demean. They acknowledge that her task is tricky: If President Joe Biden’s goal in the June debate with Trump was to prove he was fit for another four years in the White House – a test he famously failed – Harris will have a much higher hurdle to clear in this face-off. She must lay out her vision and convince voters she is ready to be commander in chief, while keeping a cool head as Trump tries to rattle her.
“Their goal is to be presidential and to withstand his attacks and continue to remind people of their framework: Let’s not go back,” Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, told me. “That’s easier said than done.”
Trump, Messina predicted, “is going to be really nasty with her and overwhelm her.” Her biggest challenge will be deciding which blows to respond to and which to ignore. “Don’t chase every attack,” Messina said. “Sometimes you just have to brush it off and look at the camera, look at the country and say: This is where I will lead us.”
Bob Shrum, who helped both Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 prepare for their debates against George W. Bush, offered similar advice. “Don’t lose your composure,” he told me he would advise Harris. “Don’t feel like you have to answer things that are unimportant and seem absurd to people.” Harris should, for example, ignore Trump when he calls her a communist, which he said is an outdated attack line that voters would find “absurd” because Harris’ economic positions are well within the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
Harris has shined in previous debates, during her successful bid for California attorney general and in the 2020 presidential campaign. Her criticism of Biden’s record on desegregation (“That little girl was me”) marked the high point of her short-lived bid for the Democratic nomination. Harris’s sharp retort to an interrupted Mike Pence – “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking” – was one of the few memorable exchanges in a vice presidential debate that would otherwise have been overshadowed by a fly on Pence’s head.
But she has never faced anyone as dogged or ruthless as Trump. The former president “is the best counterpuncher in modern political history,” Messina told me. “This is a better format for him than for her.” But to other Democrats I spoke with, this rosy assessment of Trump’s abilities sounded suspiciously like the kind of anticipation that campaigns try to create ahead of big debates to help their candidates do better than expected. The Harris campaign, for example, has complained that the vice president will be “fundamentally disadvantaged” because neither ABC News, the network hosting the debate, nor the Trump campaign will honor their request to keep the candidates’ microphones on throughout the debate; as with the Biden-Trump debate in June, the microphones will be muted when the candidates are not speaking, which could prevent viewers from hearing Trump if he tries to interrupt Harris. Trump’s frequent interruptions of Biden during their first debate in 2020 did not go over well, leading to one of Biden’s more caustic retorts when he asked Trump, “Will you shut up, man?” Democrats believe Trump is showing even less discipline four years later.
Shrum said he believes Harris will still be fine: Trump “is behaving badly in ways that are sending messages about his character, and those are not good messages.” Shrum added that he knows he should have raised expectations about Trump’s performance, “but I’m not going to do that.”
With Biden off the stage, many Democrats hope the debate will expose Trump as the weaker candidate, a 78-year-old who rambles even more than before and has trouble forming a coherent thought. “She’s going to have to get out of Trump’s way,” Ashley Etienne, who served as communications director during Harris’ first year as vice president, told me. “Let Trump be Trump and don’t argue with him point by point.” That could be difficult for Harris. “To some extent, she’s going to have to deny her prosecutorial instincts,” Etienne said.
Trump will likely try to link Harris to Biden’s unpopular economic policies and blame her for inflation. Instead of getting lost in a defense of the president’s policies, Etienne says Harris should quickly move on to her vision for the future and a criticism of Trump: “Her main concern is not defending her record. It will be talking about Donald Trump.”
The Democrats I’ve spoken to expect Harris to back off when Trump makes racist or sexist attacks on her. She did so after he said in July that she “accidentally turned black” just a few years ago, suggesting she’s exploiting that part of her identity for political gain. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked her about that comment in an interview last month, she replied, “Same old, hackneyed script. Next question, please.”
Aimee Allison, founder of a political group that advocates for the empowerment of women of color and is based in Oakland, California, told me that’s exactly the tone Harris should strike during the debate. “Continue to give no room to Trump’s obsession with identity,” Allison said. “He wants to use the age-old white male power play, but by not supporting it, it has little impact with the people who are going to vote for Kamala Harris.” She praised Harris for a campaign that has not centered the history-making nature of her candidacy, as Hillary Clinton’s “I’m with her” slogan did in 2016. “We’ve grown as a country,” she said.
How much the country has grown, however, remains an open question. Candidates in televised debates are judged almost as much by how they look when they are not speaking as by what they say when they are speaking. Think of George HW Bush’s glance at the clock in 1992, Gore’s deep sigh in 2000 and Biden’s open-mouthed stare in the debate with Trump in June. Black women are even more scrutinized for their body language, Etienne said. “She knows that. She’s gotten used to it,” she said of Harris. “I would just caution her to be mindful of her nonverbal expressions.”
Trump has belittled Harris’ intelligence, and his campaign has teased her for agreeing to few formal interviews and news conferences, implying that she is weak in situations she cannot plan for in advance. Harris actually stumbled in interviews early in her tenure as vice president, and her public image did not recover until she launched her campaign in July. Those who have worked with Harris, however, say Trump knows her only as a right-wing caricature. Tonight’s debate will be the first time they have met in person. “She’s good when she gets a little fire under her,” Etienne said. “I don’t think he’ll be prepared for that.”
