VP Harris has the most to lose in debate with Trump. Will prosecutor Harris show up?

PHILADELPHIA – Democrats wanted Vice President Kamala Harris to top their ticket partly because they thought she would eviscerate former President Donald Trump on the debate stage.

The pressure is on now for her to deliver.

Harris has the most to lose as she prepares to prosecute the case against Trump in their first – and maybe only – debate Tuesday night in Philadelphia.

Her favorability rating has eclipsed Trump’s in the seven weeks since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race after a career-ending performance in his face-off against Trump. She has pulled slightly ahead of her Republican opponent in most national polls. Harris enters the evening with the burden of high expectations because of her strong performance in previous debates and her background as a former prosecutor.

When she served as a U.S. senator, Harris went after Trump administration officials with vigor, often flustering or humiliating them during congressional hearings by assailing them with one rapid-fire question after another. Democrats are hoping she’ll take an aggressive approach against Trump.

“President Biden and Vice President Harris, while sharing similar policies, have different speaking styles, and I have no doubt that Vice President Harris is going to have a very different debate with Donald Trump than Joe Biden did,” said Halie Soifer, who was Harris’ national security adviser in the Senate.

Since becoming vice president Harris has played it extremely safe. She was scrutinized for being overly scripted, giving interviews to celebrity moderators and taking pre-screened questions at her events.

Her controlled approach has continued since she became the Democratic nominee.

She has appeared primarily at campaign functions in which she delivered prewritten remarks. With the exception of a CNN interview on Aug. 29, in which she gave rote answers to questions about her policy flip flops, Harris has mostly avoided public interactions with the media. She has not held a press conference and has steered clear of situations in which she might face tough questions or receive the kind of pushback that can make a candidate squirm and help sharpen their message.

But when she takes the stage with Trump in Philadelphia, she will be going against an opponent who has not been shy about attacking her or hurling personal insults. Trump in past debates has benefitted from low expectations.

“There is no bar too low for Trump,” said Isaac Wright, a veteran Democratic political strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns. “Nobody has expectations of him doing more than maybe stringing a few sentences together.”

“He has no regard for the truth, and that creates a unique dynamic in a debate when he is perfectly happy to lie and say anything on stage,” Wright said.

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The debate will be Harris’ first time meeting the former president, who did not attend her inauguration as vice president at the U.S. Capitol on his final day in office.

Biden had faced Trump two times on the debate stage and still got tripped up as he tried to rebut every point that Trump made with memorized jabs and statistics, a problem that his allies chalked up to over preparation.

After the president’s embarrassing debate performance, Harris’ campaign has changed its approach. The vice president is spending fewer days in solitude and doing her final prep in Pittsburgh, where she can take breaks with off-the-cuff campaign appearances.

On Saturday, during a brief stop at a spice store in Pittsburgh, she told reporters she's ready to face Trump on Tuesday. Asked what's the one thing she hopes to get across during the debate, she replied, “It’s time to turn the page on the divisiveness. It’s time to bring our country together. Chart a new way forward.”

Harris is using a strategy that the Obama campaign employed when it parked him in the battleground state of Nevada ahead of the first general election debate in 2012. One of the architects of his White House victories, David Plouffe, is among the cadre of senior Democrats who have been brought in to advise Harris now.

Harris has been proclaiming herself the “underdog” in the race over her late entry, and in her convention acceptance speech, she emphasized that she has been “underestimated at every turn” in her political career.

Yet, she drew accolades for the sharp-elbowed comments against Biden in a 2019 primary debate and for her performance in 2020 against former Vice President Mike Pence.

“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” she said when he interrupted her.

The rules now will not allow for such moments after Harris’ campaign unsuccessfully fought to have the microphones unmuted in between turns.

Her campaign told debater organizers in a letter that she would be “fundamentally disadvantaged” by the format of the 90-minute debate that her advisers demanded when Biden was the Democratic candidate.

Trump has also tried to lower expectations. He got ready for the debate with on-camera interviews and speeches, according to his campaign, and did not do formal preparation. He told the media during a Friday event that he was going into "very hostile" territory and lashed out against debate host ABC News in anticipation of what he claimed would be unfair treatment.

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Harris, the vice president

Harris has focused on putting forward a positive vision for the future of the country, presenting herself as a next-generation leader who would govern as a centrist, since she became the de facto Democratic nominee.

That strategy could come into conflict with her instincts as a former prosecutor when she debates Trump, who has signaled that he plans to bring up positions she took in her failed 2019 bid to become president that Harris says she no longer holds. He’s also hit her on the trail for the perceived failings of the Biden-Harris administration on the economy and foreign policy and incorrectly called her the country’s border czar.

“It is very easy for someone to get caught up in trying to correct, rebut or directly take on that torrent. And if you do that, then it's very easy to be taken off of any affirmative agenda or affirmative message that you have,” said Nathan Barankin, her chief of staff as California attorney general and at the beginning of her Senate term.

“So strategically, that'll be something that she and her team will have to think through very carefully about how much time they can allocate to taking that on.”

Harris has leaned into both approaches at times, hitting a positive note, and then Trump, in her prepared remarks.

“Of course, she won't be able to call him out for each individual lie, because there will be far too many, but she will identify fact from fiction and convey her message,” said Soifer, who advised Harris on national security and currently serves as the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff described Harris as “a joyful warrior” during a volunteer event Norristown, Pa., on Sunday, citing her “empathy, the caring about others, her love of her family, and translating that into working for your families too.”

“At the debate,” he warned, “Donald Trump is going to see the warrior part."

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On the trail, Trump has made her record as VP and her unsuccessful run for president in 2019 an issue in the race. He has faulted her for failing to stop the flow of illegal immigration across the nation’s border with Mexico and has tried to tie her to the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan three years ago.

His campaign also has attacked her for saying during the 2019 campaign that she would ban fracking, pass the “Green New Deal” to address climate change and support a mandatory gun buy-back program.

In a preview of how she could approach those issues in the debate, Harris told CNN that her “values have not changed,” but she has learned the value of building consensus after serving in higher office.

Harris' campaign declined to comment on her debate plans.

Trump’s team has pointed to her lack of press conferences. In a statement it mocked her campaign for finally agreeing to the debate rules it originally set and for a turn of phrase Harris has sometimes used in speeches.

“Americans want to hear both candidates present their competing visions to the voters, unburdened by what has been. No notes, no sitting down,” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said.

While Harris as vice president has had trouble at times communicating her message as Biden’s No. 2, that Harris is not the one Trump should expect to face on the debate stage, former aides say.

“You have to throw out the window, basically the last three years, because that was not the Kamala Harris that we all know,” Barankin said.

“She's using her own words and her own reasoning, because she's the one leading this campaign now, and so I anticipate seeing someone who is a lot more comfortable, persuasive and pointed than some of the versions we've seen of her in prior years,” Barankin said.

Her time in the Senate Judiciary Committee is more instructive, allies and former aides said, when as a junior senator, her question period was later than her longer-serving colleagues, yet she still found ways to drive the narrative.

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Harris not only wants to win the debate, she wants to show Americans that she is ready to be president, said John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

“Trump is trying to paint her as an extremist, ‘Comrade Kamala,’” Geer said. But, “Kamala Harris is not a communist. She’s not a socialist. Her ability to show herself as mainstream is going to be a lot easier than many think.”

In some ways, Trump’s efforts to portray Harris as an extremist are reminiscent of the 1980 presidential race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Geer said. Carter had tried to convince Americans that Reagan was dangerous. But in their only debate, held just one week before the election, “Ronald Reagan didn’t look dangerous,” Geer said. “He looked like he was totally presidential. He was fine. And it really crippled Carter’s campaign.”

The momentum swung to Reagan, and he won in a landslide.

Harris, the prosecutor

Harris will try to turn the tables on Trump, her allies say.

She has routinely used her time as a courtroom prosecutor and California attorney general as a vehicle to attack Trump on the campaign trail.

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds – predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.  So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said in a Wilmington, Del. speech to her campaign staff in July.

In the remarks, Harris said she “specialized in cases involving sexual abuse” when she worked at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. “Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse,” she said.

A jury found Trump liable in 2023 of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and ordered him to pay $5 million in damages.

Harris also invoked Trump University, stating that “Trump ran a for-profit college “that was forced to pay $25 million to the students it scammed.”

Trump University was a for-profit seminar series that promised to teach students the secrets of real estate success. After he was elected, Trump entered settlement talks in the fraud case. A federal judge finalized the deal in 2018.

In her remarks, Harris compared the case to one she was involved in as California attorney general against Corinthian Colleges.

The school filed for bankruptcy in 2015. Harris and other state attorneys general were suing it at the time for false advertising. The following year, Harris announced a $1.1 billion settlement against the school, which she filed suit against in 2013.

She has used other cases and settlements from her time in California to highlight Trump's conviction last spring on 34 counts of fraud for falsifying business records, charges that he’s facing for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his pledge to pardon Jan. 6 rioters.

“Consider not only the chaos and calamity when he was in office, but also the gravity of what has happened since he lost the last election,” Harris said in her nomination acceptance speech. “Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes. When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.”

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Harris’ courtroom experience could give her an advantage on the debate stage against Trump, Wright said.

“She is a former prosecutor who is used to prosecuting criminals, and that's exactly what this is,” he said. “She's got to be able to bring that case to the American people. She's got to put a spotlight on a criminal and ask America is that really the best we can do and offer an alternative.”

Barankin said such attacks could cut both ways politically if Harris brings up Trump’s criminal charges in the debate because it is very animating for his base. What is likely on her team’s mind, he said, is what resonates with swing voters.

Democratic strategist Faiz Shakir said while the debate carries some risks for Harris, it also gives her an opportunity to make the case against Trump.

Biden went after Trump in often personal terms during the debate on June 27, saying, for example, the former president has “the morals of an alley cat.” But Trump hasn’t yet faced an opponent this election who has aggressively hammered him on policy, Shakir said.

“She’s got the chance to bring a different perspective to Donald Trump than you might have heard,” said Shakir, who managed Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2020 and also worked as an adviser to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Trump doesn’t adhere to the normal rules of debate, Shakir said, “what he comes prepared for is psychological trolling.”

“He wants to distract you from the things you want to talk about,” he said. “He wants to talk about things he'll just bring up randomly, and they have nothing to do with the question. The challenge of it is to think of it less as a debate, because you're in a mud-wrestling contest, you're in a free-for-all.”

Trump’s unpredictability makes it hard for even the most seasoned debater to figure out how to effectively fight back.

“How anybody reacts to that is up in the air until it happens in real time,” Wright said.

How Harris responds could shape the final weeks of the election.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Will prosecutor Harris or VP Harris show up to debate Trump?