Vice President Kamala Harris sticks closely to her script and vetted talking points. Former President Donald J. Trump ad-libs freely and digresses often. Ms. Harris’s speeches seldom exceed half an hour. Mr. Trump’s remarks are usually at least twice as long. She crafts her sentences carefully. He veers often from the facts.
The two presidential candidates differ greatly in rhetoric and adherence to the truth. Ms. Harris’s repeated stump speech contains few factual errors, while Mr. Trump’s rallies are a font of exaggerations to outright lies.
On the debate stage on Tuesday night, these tendencies were on full display — Ms. Harris spoke cautiously and broadly, and Mr. Trump made impromptu remarks that veered into the outlandish. Here’s a deeper look at their contrasting styles in campaign speeches as the candidates hit the trail.
Harris’s speeches change less than Trump’s, an analysis shows.
A New York Times analysis of a month’s worth of rally speeches from each candidate showcases Mr. Trump’s freewheeling oratory and Ms. Harris’s disciplined messaging. Using an artificial intelligence model to assess semantic similarity, The Times found that Ms. Harris’s speeches on average contained remarks that were 84 percent similar, compared with 75 percent of Mr. Trump’s.
Of course, slogans — like Ms. Harris’s refrain of “we are not going back” and Mr. Trump’s “we will make America great again” — account for some of the repetition. But in many cases, even when speaking more specifically about policy or when criticizing their opponent, Ms. Harris repeated the same remarks almost verbatim while Mr. Trump improvised on the same themes. The Times found that Ms. Harris’s speeches contained more than 80 instances of repeated exact phrases, compared with fewer than a dozen for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump’s improvisational style and penchant for exaggeration lead to more falsehoods than Ms. Harris’s more controlled approach. In an August rally Mr. Trump held in Asheboro, N.C. — the event in which he veered the most from his typical rhetoric — The Times counted more than 30 falsehoods, misleading claims and exaggerations. In comparison, at her rally in Eau Claire, Wis., in August, Ms. Harris hewed closest to her talking points, and The Times found four statements that omitted context and no misleading or false claims.
Tweaks in their speeches may go entirely different directions.
In rally speeches, Mr. Trump often inflated a number further or added additional words to prepared remarks to make them even less accurate.
On multiple occasions, Mr. Trump claimed, with no evidence, that Venezuela had “dumped” huge numbers of criminals and prisoners into the United States, leading to a drastic decrease in its crime rate during the Biden-Harris administration. That supposed decline was, according to Mr. Trump in March, 66 percent; in April and May, 67 percent; and, by July, 72 percent. (There is no evidence for any of those figures. Venezuela does not release comprehensive crime information, and a Caracas-based research organization has reported a falling murder rate during both administrations, though it fell faster while Mr. Trump was in office.)
In another example, Mr. Trump has been overly broad in citing a comment Ms. Harris once made on a tax proposal by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A return to a 60 or 70 percent top marginal tax rate for those making over $10 million a year was a “bold idea,” Ms. Harris has said while arguing that intraparty policy discussions were healthy. Mr. Trump frequently omits that the rate would apply only to the wealthiest Americans and that Ms. Harris has not endorsed it. But, in some instances, Mr. Trump falsely improvises that she “wants” that rate or “she likes it.”
In contrast, Ms. Harris has amended statements to hew more closely to the facts.
For example, Ms. Harris claimed in multiple rallies in August that Mr. Trump “intends” to repeal the Affordable Care Act and “take us back to a time when insurance companies have the power to deny people with pre-existing conditions.” While Mr. Trump promised to repeal the health care law during his campaign in 2016, his statements this campaign have been more ambiguous, and he has promised to retain protections for patients with pre-existing conditions.
In her speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination at its convention in Chicago last month, Ms. Harris tweaked her previous claims about her opponent’s intentions and instead focused, more accurately, on Mr. Trump’s past actions: “We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions.”
And in an interview with CNN last month, Ms. Harris cited a specific example of a “grandmother” in Nevada who was saving hundreds of dollars a month on insulin thanks to a price cap enacted by the Biden administration. By focusing on one individual’s experience, Ms. Harris was able to avoid speaking overly broadly about the price cap’s impact, as President Biden has done when he overstated its average impact.
Harris and Trump both employ purposeful ambiguity.
In general, Ms. Harris offers few details and instead describes her background and proposals and even criticisms of Mr. Trump in broad, thematic terms, with few specific facts and fewer factual errors.
For example, Ms. Harris often alludes to Project 2025, a set of right-wing policy proposals. But she rarely devotes time to particulars.
“Just look at his Project 2025 agenda,” she said in several rallies, without much further explanation, letting voters fill in the blanks. “I can’t believe they put that in writing.”
While neither Mr. Trump nor his campaign created Project 2025, there are many ties between his administration and the project, and there is some overlap between the proposals and Mr. Trump’s agenda and actions during his term in office.
Mr. Trump too can be vague, and his positions on politically disadvantageous issues like abortion and health care can be hard to pin down.
Mr. Trump has said on social media he was “not running to terminate” the Affordable Care Act, and said in August that would keep the law in place “unless we can do something much better. We’ll keep it. But we can do much better.”
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