Why Kamala Harris has the advantage in debating Donald Trump
She’s better at it
“All of the things that we’ve done, nobody’s ever, never seen anything like, even from a medical standpoint. Right to try, where we can try space age materials instead of going to Asia or going to Europe and trying to get when you’re terminally ill. Now, you can go and you can get something. You sign a document.” Thus spake Donald Trump during his debate with President Joe Biden in June. Sift a bit, and maybe consult Google, and you can extract the meaning from the heap of words, shovelled up as part of his closing argument. The debate, a disaster for Mr Biden, may yet also prove one for Mr Trump, who did well that evening only because his opponent did worse.
In fact, Mr Biden’s answers often seemed more on point when read in transcription. His shaky delivery doomed him, along with his failure to counter his blundering adversary. Mr Trump looped back on himself, adduced perplexing facts (“We bought the certain dog”) and emitted gassy bubbles of unreality that a nimbler opponent, with a sharper wit, would have delighted in popping. “Everybody, without exception” wanted Roe v Wade overturned? Nancy Pelosi said, “I take full responsibility” for the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021? “We’re living in hell”? Really?
Vice-President Kamala Harris may prove to be that nimble, mocking adversary if Mr Trump debates her as planned on September 10th. A review of her debates so far, including in her statewide campaigns in California, suggests she is far less prone in such face-offs to the abstract meandering that, before she was the nominee, could confuse audiences during her extemporaneous remarks or interviews. The presence of an adversary seems to focus and energise her.
Mr Trump has a gift for upselling people already inclined to buy his wares; Ms Harris trained as a prosecutor to persuade diverse juries to believe her story rather than a contending one. The candidates’ prior careers may have left both of them less preoccupied with nuance or objective truth than with their preferred sets of facts. But where his experience persuaded Mr Trump of the power of the bombast he has called “truthful hyperbole”, her own background appears to have concentrated Ms Harris on preparing her cases to overcome reasonable doubts, while scrutinising her opponents’ arguments for weaknesses.
“That’s not true!” Senator Harris exclaimed during the fifth Democratic primary debate, on November 20th 2019, when Joe Biden claimed to have been endorsed by “the only African-American woman” ever elected to the Senate. “The other one is here,” she added. As she often does during such attacks, she laughed merrily, choosing to be amused rather than offended by her pitiable adversary, and the audience laughed along with her.
In what proved a pivotal moment in her race for attorney-general of California in 2010, her opponent, a longtime public prosecutor named Steve Cooley, was asked if he would accept his pension for previous service along with the salary that would go with the new position. He said he would because he had “definitely earned” it and would rely on it “to supplement the very low, incredibly low salary that’s paid to the state attorney-general”. Ms Harris lit up like a blowtorch. “Go for it, Steve!” she said, laughing uproariously. “You’ve earned it, there’s no question.” Mr Trump seldom if ever smiles in debate, much less laughs.
Ms Harris can also be deft in flashing anger, turning attempts by opponents to paint her as weak into opportunities to show strength. “I will not sit here and be lectured by the vice-president on what it means to enforce the laws of our country,” Ms Harris shot back during her debate with Vice-President Mike Pence in October 2020, a contest she won, according to polls at the time.
Ms Harris has less experience on this big stage, and she has many vulnerabilities. Mr Trump may succeed in embarrassing her over the withdrawal from Afghanistan or illegal immigration. He will no doubt accuse her of reversing herself on important positions. But here Ms Harris might prove to have the stronger hand: she seems more at home with her new stances. Mr Trump, by contrast, is struggling to find some new middle-ish ground on one of her core issues, reproductive rights. And while Mr Trump has yet to settle on a line of attack against Ms Harris, toggling between treating her as a joke and a menace, she has been honing her criticisms of him for years. Mr Trump is so prickly about his self-image, if not his honour, that he has been easy to bait into defensive claims about everything from his intelligence to his golf swing.
A sign of Ms Harris’s confidence is that while Mr Biden requested that the debaters’ microphones be silenced when it was not their turn to speak, to prevent Mr Trump from interrupting, she wanted them left open. The Harris campaign repeatedly told the press that Mr Trump’s aides were insisting the mics be closed, in a clear bid to taunt Mr Trump into overruling them. He did not.
Ms Harris is betting that Mr Trump’s urge to project dominance will get him in trouble. She made the much milder Mr Pence look like a cad, and herself appear strong, by staring him down and sternly saying, “Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking” when he interrupted her. That moment went viral on social media, and it clearly haunts Mr Trump. He cited it recently in calling Ms Harris “a nasty person” who was “horrible” to Mr Pence, though threats by Mr Trump’s supporters to hang Mr Pence might seem a bit harsher.
Before Mr Biden’s belly flop in June, conventional wisdom had concluded debates don’t matter much. Polls showed, for example, that in 2016 Hillary Clinton easily won all three debates against Mr Trump. But in contrast to Ms Clinton or Mr Trump, Americans are still getting to know Ms Harris. This debate is her best chance before the election to show she would be the better president.
The Economist, Sep 5th 2024
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