-
The 2024 race is still too close to predict as long as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are still debating.
-
Harris enters the debate with clear momentum, but Trump has held his own in the small number of battleground states.
-
Tuesday night’s debate could turn an already chaotic race on its head.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will share the stage for the first time Tuesday night, giving voters a taste of the two leading presidential candidates together after a summer of unprecedented turmoil.
Trump has appeared to slow Harris’s rise, which began after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. She has outpaced the former president’s fundraising numbers, held raucous rallies and, most importantly, eroded his lead in the polls. But a closely watched New York Times-Siena poll out Sunday showed why Trump is still a slight favorite in many cases.
Polls in most battleground states show margins too narrow to predict. At this point in 2016, Trump trailed Hillary Clinton. And in that race as well as in 2020, pollsters underestimated his support. Trump is also holding strong in Pennsylvania, the key battleground in the election.
The debate offers both sides a chance to shake up the race on a knife’s edge. Harris will face her largest audience since securing her historic nomination. Tens of millions of Americans historically tune in to watch these showdowns. More than 51 million tuned in to the June debate, the earliest ever, which included a 2020 rematch that polls have long expected the nation to face. In both 2016 and 2020, only the Super Bowl drew higher ratings.
“It’s like the NFL and the debates are by far the most watched and all these people are watching. Research shows that voters learn a lot from the debates and they leave the debates feeling confident that they’ve got the campaign up to speed to meaningfully engage in politics,” said Ben Warner, a professor of political communication at the University of Missouri.
Warner says the age-old Washington game about how important debates really are overshadows what he and other researchers have found: that ordinary Americans base their opinions of the candidates on debates.
“You can say, ‘Can they really learn the nuances of the policy differences between the candidates?'” Warned said. “I think what’s more important is how they feel about the candidates as people, they feel like they know what the candidates stand for and they feel comfortable making an informed decision between the candidates.”
Trump will likely confront Harris about her changing views.
This will also be Harris’ most unscripted moment yet. Trump and his allies have tried in vain to push her to hold more press conferences. They’ve also pointed out that her website had no policy positions as of Sunday night.
“Kamala was in a total bubble, she only did half an interview and didn’t have a single unprepared moment,” Matt Wolking, who served as deputy communications director for Trump’s 2020 candidacy, told Total Business Insider.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, but beyond that appearance, the vice president has had little interaction with the press. By comparison, Trump has held multiple press conferences and has tried to appeal to younger men with lengthy interviews with podcast hosts. At the same time, Harris has backed away from many of the most progressive positions she took during her failed 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign. Trump’s allies are hoping he will address what they see as unfair spins.
“She’s not really sure what she believes, so she’s been quite evasive when it comes to answering questions about policy, policy positions that she’s supported in the past and what she’s supposedly not supporting now,” Wolking said. “I think the fact that she’s embraced two or three of Trump’s positions makes her seem like a chameleon.”
Trump lashed out at Harris after she followed him in promising not to tax tips, a policy promoted by Nevada’s powerful Culinary Union. Harris also hasn’t offered much explanation for her shifting views. When asked about it by Bash, the vice president repeatedly stated that while some of her views may have changed, “my values haven’t changed.”
A Democratic pollster warns Harris to be careful with her response.
Since replacing Biden, Harris’ team has embraced a more sarcastic, trolling tone, aimed at getting under Trump’s skin. Democratic pollster Evan Roth Smith said Harris should make sure the lasting moment of the debate isn’t a one-liner but rather an imprint of what she would do in office.
“Voters are 10 times out of 10 more interested in what Kamala Harris is going to do and plans to do than in anything else, whether it’s a snappy rebuttal, an attack on Donald Trump or anything else that might come out of Kamala Harris’ mouth,” Roth Smith, chief pollster for Reid Hoffman-backed Blueprint, told Business Insider.
Roth Smith’s polls have shown that voters would prefer Harris to continue to state her positions “in relatively broad terms.” He warned against getting too bogged down in specific policies.
“No matter who you ask, whether it’s the good faith actors or the bad faith actors, it would be a mistake if Kamala Harris and the Harris campaign 60 Days Ahead became a campaign of policy briefs rather than a campaign of priorities, energy, directional focus,” Roth Smith. “They seem to understand that and I hope we’ll see that in the debate.”
Harris herself has dismissed Trump’s personal attacks as inconsequential, but Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik says he will be watching closely how the former president handles her. Trump has a long history of attacking female enemies in particularly caustic ways, which has underscored and exacerbated his struggle to appeal to women more broadly.
“I think it’s particularly relevant in this election, given how Trump treats women in general and how Trump treats black women in particular,” Sosnik said. “To me, that dynamic is one of the most important to watch.”
Sosnik stressed that viewers may react differently to Trump’s actions than they did in 2016, when he famously stood behind Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during their town hall debate. Candidates are required to remain behind their podiums during Tuesday’s debate, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from making statements like when he called Clinton a “nasty woman,” an attack Democrats later turned into a badge of honor.
“The world is different in many ways now than it was eight years ago. That includes the behavior he showed in 2016. I think he was able to offend a lot more people then than he is now, especially male voters, but certainly also female voters,” Sosnik said.
The race is so close that even a small lead after the debate can make a huge difference.
Tuesday’s debate will mark the first time Harris and Trump will be in the same room together. It was to be the second debate between Trump and Biden, but the president’s disastrous debate performance set off a downward spiral that culminated in his decision to withdraw. With the possible exception of the Nixon-Kennedy debate, no other presidential debate in history will be bigger.
The Harris-Trump debate will struggle to match that. But the incredibly close race means their debate will matter — perhaps much more than usual.
“I could show you more often that none of those three things matter in terms of the outcome of the election,” Sosnik said of how the vice presidential election, the conventions and the debates rarely play a major role. “In this election, probably all three mattered. The debates certainly mattered and will matter.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
