At the ABC debate in Philadelphia against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris isn’t so much planning to prosecute him as much as introduce herself to the still-sizable portion of voters who don’t know her and could decide the election.
It’s the stuff of #Resistance dreams: Kamala Harris, the prosecutor, gets onstage in Philadelphia next Tuesday across from Donald Trump, the felon, and proceeds to brutally expose him as a racist and sexist con man who’s been lying to the American people ever since his famous escalator ride nine years ago.
Only that’s not how she or her debate-prep team sees her main objective for the debate — at all.
In mock-debate sessions in Pittsburgh, planning meetings in Washington, and briefing-book cram sessions between public events on the campaign trail, the vice-president and her aides have kept much of their focus on fine-tuning ways to keep presenting her as representative of a new political era for the benefit of curious voters who are still interested in learning more about her — and who may swing the race come November.
The debate, say Democrats close to Harris, is simply not the venue for just pumping up her partisans or trying to fulfill a liberal fantasy of so aggressively confronting Trump that his own supporters have second thoughts about voting for him. Instead, Harris’s team believes it needs to be about finding moments to educate and convert the voters on the margins. And for a candidate whose rallies feature “A NEW WAY FORWARD” signage and repeated audience chants of “we’re not going back,” that primarily means trying to keep the focus on her own vision for the future and contrasting it with Trump’s. “She’s not known in the way Donald Trump is,” says one senior Democrat who used to work for Joe Biden and is now close to the Harris campaign’s leaders. “It’s an opportunity to define herself, which is exciting because who has that opportunity in September of an election year?” What she left unsaid: that this is also why the debate is so risky for Harris, since Trump has a chance to define her, too.
Part of Harris world’s thinking is that voters already know about Trump’s character and have set views of him that aren’t worth reinforcing in the tight but highly valuable speaking windows Harris will have on the campaign stage. (It’s not like she has new information to add that might change those views.) And since the debate rules about muted microphones mean she is unlikely to have many clear back-and-forths with him, many close to her team figure she should not try too hard to create moments like her viral ones questioning Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh as a senator.
That’s not to say Harris is unlikely to criticize Trump, just that those critiques will likely be more along policy lines than personal ones. Indictments of his record as president and some of the more unpopular elements of Project 2025, such as abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, are likely to feature prominently in the case she makes for her candidacy. This is the tack her campaign has mostly taken in its paid advertising, even if some of its social-media output has also been trolling Trump for his incoherence and, indirectly, his age. Just last week, the Democratic research group Blueprint tested messaging and found that pro-Harris forces would be smarter to rely on ads featuring a contrast and positive lines about Harris over negative ones on Trump — voters are twice as likely to be moved by the former than the latter, which are only useful on the margins.
