For eight years, Donald trump He continues to dominate the American political scene. But as he prepares to move on Discussion Vice President Kamala Harris Next week, for the first time, the former president faces a rare moment when the focus will be more on his opponent than on him.
Since Harris’s surprise entry to replace President Joe Biden in July, the race has emerged as the central political battleground of the 2024 contest.
Voter sentiment about Trump has hardened after a decade in the public eye. Those sentiments have remained effectively frozen, even after impeachment, indictment, a felony conviction and an assassination attempt. In comparison, Harris’s support has been volatile. Voter opinion of the vice president has suddenly and sharply improved in the roughly seven weeks of her candidacy, strengthening her position against Trump.
For Harris, Tuesday’s debate is the best chance to consolidate those gains. For Trump, it’s the biggest opportunity to diminish or reverse them.
The event will be Trump’s seventh time taking the stage at a general election presidential debate — the most for any candidate in the modern era — while it will be Harris’ first time. Strategists aligned with each Campaign He said that means there is very little new information to learn about him and a lot for voters to learn about him.
“Voters chose Donald Trump in 2016 and they haven’t changed their minds,” said Republican pollster Robert Blizzard. “The difference is that voters have started to change their minds about Kamala Harris.”
The battle over who Harris is — and what she stands for — is already dominating the airwaves in key swing states. Trump, Harris and allies of their major super political action committee have paid for the airing of nearly 325,000 television ads since she entered the race, about 95% of them focused on her, according to a New York Times analysis of ad-tracking data from AdImpact.
Trump’s campaign has tried to launch a three-pronged attack on Harris as “failed, weak, dangerously liberal” and link the vice president to the more unpopular parts of the Biden-Harris record, particularly on immigration and the economy. Harris’s campaign has presented her as a tough former prosecutor who understands the needs of the middle class and who would offer the nation a fresh start, even if her party already occupies the White House.
A quirk of the compressed calendar gave Harris another advantage: Democrats were able to use their convention to campaign in her favor over four days, but Republicans focused their earlier convention on her opponent at the time: Biden. Democrats pitched Harris as the change candidate who could reclaim traditional GOP territory of patriotism and freedom, presenting abortion as a fundamental right.
In June, the Biden campaign had pushed the message that the presidential debate plan included attacking Trump for being only running for himself and his billionaire friends. But Biden never fully implemented those attack lines. Harris will have a chance to make that case on Tuesday.
From the time Harris emerged as the candidate through midweek, the Trump campaign has aired 84,937 ads, all but 189 of which prominently feature Harris, according to AdImpact data. Meanwhile, more than 90% of the ads Harris has run have focused heavily on her biography, her agenda or both. Future Forward, the main pro-Harris super PAC, has not run any purely anti-Trump ads since she ran.
The importance of presidential debates — watched by hundreds of millions of Americans — came to the fore in June when Biden’s erratic and halting speech performance raised questions about his age and ultimately led to him dropping out of the race less than a month later.
Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia will be the longest, unscripted debate yet for Harris’s candidacy — a high-stakes encounter with an opponent who pays no heed to decorum.
The 90-minute debate, hosted by ABC News, will have the same rules and format as the one between Trump and Biden in June, including muting microphones when it is not a candidate’s turn to speak, a provision the Harris team had sought to eliminate.
Harris’s team was hoping to recreate a moment like in 2020, when her “I’m speaking” response to former Vice President Mike Pence’s interruption became one of the most memorable moments of the meeting.
Trump’s team is eager to distance Harris from their issues. But Trump himself has struggled to craft an effective message against Harris, having attacked her character, her record, her racial identity and her shifting stances on key issues in a number of interviews and speeches.
“He’s been trying to define him and, in a very un-Trumpian way, he hasn’t succeeded,” said Democratic strategist Jennifer Holdsworth. “First, he tried to make him Biden. Then he tried to make him some liberal DA from San Francisco. He even tried the path of hateful racism. He hasn’t been able to land a beat on him.”
Harris’s surge in favorability ratings has been one of the most notable elements of her brief candidacy. More voters disliked her than liked her in early July, according to a 538 polling average — up from a net unfavorable rating that has now been roughly equal.
Perhaps the most important task for Trump is to ensure that Harris remains closely aligned with Biden on issues where she is unpopular. In Trump’s most-aired television ad to date, Harris promotes “Bidenomics” three times during negative economic data about gasoline prices, rising inflation and high interest rates, according to data from AdImpact.
For now, Harris does not appear to be burdened by voter dissatisfaction with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies. A Washington Post/ABC News poll last month showed that only 11% of voters thought Harris had a lot of influence on economic policy within the Biden administration and 15% said the same about immigration — despite the Trump team’s efforts to tag her as the “border czar.”
“She’s getting all the good things about being part of the administration and none of the bad things,” Blizzard said. “She’s not acknowledging the perceived failures of the Biden administration.”
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign, said the Trump campaign has gotten caught up in making contradictory arguments in calling Harris both ineffective and effective.
“You can’t say she didn’t do anything and still be the driver of Bidenomics,” Lake said. “You can’t have it both ways.”
At an event in Arizona on Wednesday, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, a Trump running mate, previewed the balancing act of the Trump campaign message, tagging Harris as a “radical” and an inauthentic flip-flopper now leaning toward the center after a 2020 presidential primary in which she veered left.
“She wanted to defund the police. Now, she says she doesn’t do that. She wanted to ban fracking. Now, she says she doesn’t do that. She was the border czar who opened up the southern border of the United States. But now, all of a sudden, she says she believes in border security,” Vance said.
Vance said he joked with Trump that Harris could now wear a long red tie to mimic Trump’s stage style.
Both Trump’s and Harris’ teams and their allies have spent heavily on television ads about immigration, with one Trump ad listing various crimes committed by immigrants released while Harris was district attorney. “The victim’s blood is on her hands,” the ad concludes.
Harris’s team has used her tenure as California attorney general to bolster her tough-on-crime image, calling her a “frontline state prosecutor” in one ad.
Of course, debates are often about issues as well as perceptions, such as voters’ perceptions of a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, readiness and temperament.
On Thursday, Harris arrived in Pittsburgh to begin days of rigorous debate preparations. But she began planning for the debate months ago — even before she became a presidential candidate.
He built a debate team led by Karen Dunn, a veteran Democratic lawyer. Philippe Reines, who played Trump in Hillary Clinton’s debate preparations four years ago, was recruited as Vance’s stand-in when he was her potential debate opponent. Now, Reines is reprising the role of Trump.
In an appearance on CNN this year, Reines described himself as a “Daniel Day-Lewis-like guy,” just like the actor who plays him. The post pinned to the top of his X account is a 2016 practice debate in which he, playing Trump, tried to hug Clinton.
“You want to throw everything at them,” Reines said on CNN, emphasizing the importance of having a candidate prepared for every situation.
Trump prefers a more ad-hoc format for debate preparation, discussing ideas and lines of attack with his advisers and friends. Trump is upset that he is running against Harris, whom he clearly does not respect.
“He was very controlled in the Biden debate, and he benefited from that,” Lake said of Trump. “The risk is whether Trump can control himself.”
There’s one final reason why Tuesday’s debate is particularly important. So far, it’s the only debate the two sides have agreed on, though there have been talks with NBC about another debate.
Since Harris’s surprise entry to replace President Joe Biden in July, the race has emerged as the central political battleground of the 2024 contest.
Voter sentiment about Trump has hardened after a decade in the public eye. Those sentiments have remained effectively frozen, even after impeachment, indictment, a felony conviction and an assassination attempt. In comparison, Harris’s support has been volatile. Voter opinion of the vice president has suddenly and sharply improved in the roughly seven weeks of her candidacy, strengthening her position against Trump.
For Harris, Tuesday’s debate is the best chance to consolidate those gains. For Trump, it’s the biggest opportunity to diminish or reverse them.
The event will be Trump’s seventh time taking the stage at a general election presidential debate — the most for any candidate in the modern era — while it will be Harris’ first time. Strategists aligned with each Campaign He said that means there is very little new information to learn about him and a lot for voters to learn about him.
“Voters chose Donald Trump in 2016 and they haven’t changed their minds,” said Republican pollster Robert Blizzard. “The difference is that voters have started to change their minds about Kamala Harris.”
The battle over who Harris is — and what she stands for — is already dominating the airwaves in key swing states. Trump, Harris and allies of their major super political action committee have paid for the airing of nearly 325,000 television ads since she entered the race, about 95% of them focused on her, according to a New York Times analysis of ad-tracking data from AdImpact.
Trump’s campaign has tried to launch a three-pronged attack on Harris as “failed, weak, dangerously liberal” and link the vice president to the more unpopular parts of the Biden-Harris record, particularly on immigration and the economy. Harris’s campaign has presented her as a tough former prosecutor who understands the needs of the middle class and who would offer the nation a fresh start, even if her party already occupies the White House.
A quirk of the compressed calendar gave Harris another advantage: Democrats were able to use their convention to campaign in her favor over four days, but Republicans focused their earlier convention on her opponent at the time: Biden. Democrats pitched Harris as the change candidate who could reclaim traditional GOP territory of patriotism and freedom, presenting abortion as a fundamental right.
In June, the Biden campaign had pushed the message that the presidential debate plan included attacking Trump for being only running for himself and his billionaire friends. But Biden never fully implemented those attack lines. Harris will have a chance to make that case on Tuesday.
From the time Harris emerged as the candidate through midweek, the Trump campaign has aired 84,937 ads, all but 189 of which prominently feature Harris, according to AdImpact data. Meanwhile, more than 90% of the ads Harris has run have focused heavily on her biography, her agenda or both. Future Forward, the main pro-Harris super PAC, has not run any purely anti-Trump ads since she ran.
The importance of presidential debates — watched by hundreds of millions of Americans — came to the fore in June when Biden’s erratic and halting speech performance raised questions about his age and ultimately led to him dropping out of the race less than a month later.
Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia will be the longest, unscripted debate yet for Harris’s candidacy — a high-stakes encounter with an opponent who pays no heed to decorum.
The 90-minute debate, hosted by ABC News, will have the same rules and format as the one between Trump and Biden in June, including muting microphones when it is not a candidate’s turn to speak, a provision the Harris team had sought to eliminate.
Harris’s team was hoping to recreate a moment like in 2020, when her “I’m speaking” response to former Vice President Mike Pence’s interruption became one of the most memorable moments of the meeting.
Trump’s team is eager to distance Harris from their issues. But Trump himself has struggled to craft an effective message against Harris, having attacked her character, her record, her racial identity and her shifting stances on key issues in a number of interviews and speeches.
“He’s been trying to define him and, in a very un-Trumpian way, he hasn’t succeeded,” said Democratic strategist Jennifer Holdsworth. “First, he tried to make him Biden. Then he tried to make him some liberal DA from San Francisco. He even tried the path of hateful racism. He hasn’t been able to land a beat on him.”
Harris’s surge in favorability ratings has been one of the most notable elements of her brief candidacy. More voters disliked her than liked her in early July, according to a 538 polling average — up from a net unfavorable rating that has now been roughly equal.
Perhaps the most important task for Trump is to ensure that Harris remains closely aligned with Biden on issues where she is unpopular. In Trump’s most-aired television ad to date, Harris promotes “Bidenomics” three times during negative economic data about gasoline prices, rising inflation and high interest rates, according to data from AdImpact.
For now, Harris does not appear to be burdened by voter dissatisfaction with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies. A Washington Post/ABC News poll last month showed that only 11% of voters thought Harris had a lot of influence on economic policy within the Biden administration and 15% said the same about immigration — despite the Trump team’s efforts to tag her as the “border czar.”
“She’s getting all the good things about being part of the administration and none of the bad things,” Blizzard said. “She’s not acknowledging the perceived failures of the Biden administration.”
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign, said the Trump campaign has gotten caught up in making contradictory arguments in calling Harris both ineffective and effective.
“You can’t say she didn’t do anything and still be the driver of Bidenomics,” Lake said. “You can’t have it both ways.”
At an event in Arizona on Wednesday, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, a Trump running mate, previewed the balancing act of the Trump campaign message, tagging Harris as a “radical” and an inauthentic flip-flopper now leaning toward the center after a 2020 presidential primary in which she veered left.
“She wanted to defund the police. Now, she says she doesn’t do that. She wanted to ban fracking. Now, she says she doesn’t do that. She was the border czar who opened up the southern border of the United States. But now, all of a sudden, she says she believes in border security,” Vance said.
Vance said he joked with Trump that Harris could now wear a long red tie to mimic Trump’s stage style.
Both Trump’s and Harris’ teams and their allies have spent heavily on television ads about immigration, with one Trump ad listing various crimes committed by immigrants released while Harris was district attorney. “The victim’s blood is on her hands,” the ad concludes.
Harris’s team has used her tenure as California attorney general to bolster her tough-on-crime image, calling her a “frontline state prosecutor” in one ad.
Of course, debates are often about issues as well as perceptions, such as voters’ perceptions of a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, readiness and temperament.
On Thursday, Harris arrived in Pittsburgh to begin days of rigorous debate preparations. But she began planning for the debate months ago — even before she became a presidential candidate.
He built a debate team led by Karen Dunn, a veteran Democratic lawyer. Philippe Reines, who played Trump in Hillary Clinton’s debate preparations four years ago, was recruited as Vance’s stand-in when he was her potential debate opponent. Now, Reines is reprising the role of Trump.
In an appearance on CNN this year, Reines described himself as a “Daniel Day-Lewis-like guy,” just like the actor who plays him. The post pinned to the top of his X account is a 2016 practice debate in which he, playing Trump, tried to hug Clinton.
“You want to throw everything at them,” Reines said on CNN, emphasizing the importance of having a candidate prepared for every situation.
Trump prefers a more ad-hoc format for debate preparation, discussing ideas and lines of attack with his advisers and friends. Trump is upset that he is running against Harris, whom he clearly does not respect.
“He was very controlled in the Biden debate, and he benefited from that,” Lake said of Trump. “The risk is whether Trump can control himself.”
There’s one final reason why Tuesday’s debate is particularly important. So far, it’s the only debate the two sides have agreed on, though there have been talks with NBC about another debate.
