For eight years, Donald J. Trump has singularly dominated the American political landscape. But as he prepares to debate Vice President Kamala Harris for the first time next week, the former president is facing a rare moment when the spotlight will be far more on his opponent than on him.
The race to define Ms. Harris has emerged as a central political battleground of the 2024 contest since her surprise entry replacing President Biden in July.
Voter sentiments about Mr. Trump have hardened after a decade in the public eye. Those sentiments have been effectively frozen even after impeachments, indictments, a felony conviction and an assassination attempt. In comparison, Ms. Harris’s support has been volatile. Voter views of the vice president have improved suddenly and sharply in the nearly seven weeks of her candidacy, strengthening her standing against Mr. Trump.
For Ms. Harris, the debate on Tuesday is her best chance to solidify those gains. For Mr. Trump, it is his greatest opportunity to undercut or reverse them.
The event will be Mr. Trump’s seventh time taking the stage in a general-election presidential debate — the most of any candidate in the modern era — while it will be Ms. Harris’s debut. Strategists allied with each campaign said that means there is little new information to be gleaned about him and much for voters to learn about her.
“Voters decided on Donald Trump in 2016 and have not changed their mind,” said Robert Blizzard, a veteran Republican pollster. “The difference is voters have started to change their minds on Kamala Harris.”
The fight over who Ms. Harris is — and what she stands for — has already been dominating the airwaves in the key swing states. Of the roughly 325,000 airings of television ads that Mr. Trump, Ms. Harris and their leading super PAC allies have paid for since she entered the race, about 95 percent of them have focused on her, according to a New York Times analysis of ad-tracking data from AdImpact.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has sought to label Ms. Harris with a three-pronged attack of “failed, weak, dangerously liberal” and to tie the vice president to the more unpopular parts of the Biden-Harris record, especially on immigration and the economy. Ms. Harris’s campaign has cast her as a tough-on-the-border former prosecutor who understands the needs of the middle class and who would offer the nation a fresh start even if her party already holds the White House.
A quirk of the compressed calendar delivered Ms. Harris another benefit: Democrats were able to use their convention to frame her favorably over four days, but Republicans focused their earlier convention on their rival at the time: Mr. Biden. Democrats cast Ms. Harris as the candidate of change who could reclaim the traditional G.O.P. terrain of patriotism and freedom, framing abortion as a fundamental right.
Back in June, the Biden campaign had telegraphed that the president’s debate plans included attacking Mr. Trump as running only for himself and his billionaire buddies. But Mr. Biden never fully executed those attack lines. Ms. Harris will have a chance to make that case Tuesday.
Of the 84,937 ads that the Trump campaign has broadcast from the time Ms. Harris emerged as a candidate through midweek, all but 189 have featured Ms. Harris prominently, according to the AdImpact data. More than 90 percent of the ads that Ms. Harris has run, meanwhile, have focused heavily on her biography, her agenda or both. The leading pro-Harris super PAC, Future Forward, has not run any purely anti-Trump ads since she began running.
The importance of a presidential debate — with tens of millions of Americans tuning in — was underscored in June when Mr. Biden’s meandering and halting performance raised questions about his age and ultimately drove him from the race less than a month later.
The debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday will be, by far, the longest unscripted setting for Ms. Harris of her candidacy — a high-risk encounter against an opponent with little regard for decorum.
Hosted by ABC News, the 90-minute debate will have the same rules and format as the one in June between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, including the muting of microphones when it’s not a candidate’s turn to speak, a provision that the Harris team had sought to eliminate.
The Harris team had been hoping to recreate a moment like she had in 2020, when her “I’m speaking” retort to former Vice President Mike Pence’s interruptions became one of the most memorable moments of that encounter.
The Trump team is eager to see Ms. Harris knocked off her talking points. But Mr. Trump himself has struggled to settle on an effective anti-Harris message of his own, cycling through a number of attacks in interviews and speeches on Ms. Harris’s character, her record, her racial identity and her shifting positions on key issues.
“He’s been attempting to define her and, in a very un-Trumpian way, he has not been successful,” said Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist. “First, he tried to make her Biden. Then he tried to make her some liberal San Francisco D.A. He even tried the abhorrent racism route. He has not landed a hit on her.”
The jump in Ms. Harris’s favorable rating has been one of the more remarkable elements of her brief candidacy. She went from a net unfavorable rating — by 17 percentage points, more voters disliked her than liked her in early July, according to 538’s polling average — to a virtual even share of voters approving and disapproving of her now.
Perhaps the most urgent task for Mr. Trump is to ensure Ms. Harris remains closely associated with Mr. Biden on issues where he is unpopular. Mr. Trump’s most-aired television ad so far, according to AdImpact’s data, features Ms. Harris promoting “Bidenomics” three times during a blitz of negative economic statistics about gasoline prices, soaring inflation and high interest rates.
For now, Ms. Harris has not appeared to be weighed down with the baggage of voter displeasure with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies. A Washington Post/ABC News poll last month showed that only 11 percent of voters thought Ms. Harris had a great deal of influence within the Biden administration on economic policy and 15 percent said the same of immigration — despite the Trump team’s efforts to tag her as the “border czar.”
“She’s getting all of the good and none of the bad of being part of the administration,” said Mr. Blizzard, the Republican pollster. “She’s not owning the perceived failures of the Biden administration.”
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign, said the Trump campaign was bogged down by making contradictory arguments in calling Ms. Harris both ineffectual and influential.
“You can’t say she did nothing and yet she was the driver of Bidenomics,” Ms. Lake said. “You can’t have it both ways.”
At an event on Wednesday in Arizona, Senator JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s running mate, previewed the balancing act of the Trump campaign message, tagging Ms. Harris as both “radical” and an inauthentic flip-flopper who was now veering toward the center after a 2020 presidential primary in which she tacked to the left.
“She wanted to defund the police. Now, she says she doesn’t. She wanted to ban fracking. Now she says she doesn’t. She was the border czar who opened the American southern border. But now all of a sudden, she says she believes in border security,” Mr. Vance said.
Mr. Vance added that he had joked with Mr. Trump that Ms. Harris might show up with an elongated red tie now that she is mimicking the Trump platform.
Both the Trump and Harris teams, and their allies, have spent heavily on television ads about immigration, with one Trump spot listing various crimes committed by migrants released when Ms. Harris was a district attorney. “The victim’s blood is on her hands,” the ad concludes.
The Harris team has used her tenure as California attorney general to buff up her tough-on-crime bona fides, calling her a “border-state prosecutor” in one ad.
Of course, debates are often about impressions as much as they are about issues, voters’ sense of a candidate’s strength and weakness, readiness and temperament.
On Thursday, Ms. Harris arrived in Pittsburgh for multiple days of rigorous debate preparations. But she first began to plan for the debate months ago — before she was even a presidential candidate.
She assembled a debate team, led by Karen Dunn, a veteran Democratic lawyer. Philippe Reines, who played Mr. Trump in Mrs. Clinton’s debate prep four years ago, was recruited as Mr. Vance’s stand-in back when he was her expected debate opponent. Now, Mr. Reines is reprising the role of Mr. Trump.
In an appearance on CNN this year, Mr. Reines described himself as a “Daniel Day-Lewis kind of guy” in terms of an actor inhabiting his character. The pinned post atop his X account is a practice debate from 2016 where, while playing Mr. Trump, he tried to hug Mrs. Clinton.
“You want to throw everything at them,” Mr. Reines said on CNN, emphasizing the importance of getting the candidate ready for every eventuality.
Mr. Trump tends to prefer a more ad hoc format to prepare for debates, batting around ideas and lines of attack with his advisers and friends. Mr. Trump remains embittered he is running against Ms. Harris, whom he has made plain he does not respect.
“He was very controlled in the Biden debate and he benefited from that,” Ms. Lake said of Mr. Trump. “The risk is can Trump control himself.”
There is one last reason the Tuesday debate could loom especially large. So far, it’s the only debate the two sides have agreed to, though there have been talks with NBC about one more.
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