Amid all the polls, punditry, and psychopathology, America’s 2024 presidential campaign boils down to this:
If Kamala Harris wins, we’ll undoubtedly have another election in 2028.
If Donald Trump wins, we quite possibly will not.
“A vote for Donald Trump may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in,” said former Rep. Liz Cheney. “A vote for Donald Trump is a vote against the Constitution.”
Leader of the House of Representative’s encyclopedic investigation of the January 6 seditious riot, Cheney has emerged as the most visible, and most clearly spoken, among the small group of Republicans warning of the dangers of a second Trump White House term.
Eight weeks before Election Day, Trump and Harris are set to meet on Tuesday in what may be their only debate, as new polling shows the race tied, nationally and in each of the toss-up states — making Cheney’s bid to convince even a few Republican voters to cross partisan lines and back the Democratic vice president a slim-chance, but potentially crucial, effort.
The 90-minute debate at Philadelphia’s National Constitutional Center is scheduled to air on ABC channels (KEYT-3 in Santa Barbara) and stream on ABC News Live at 6 p.m. PDT.
The event extends a summer of momentous political drama that began with Joe Biden’s ruinous performance in a similar debate against Trump less than three months ago. It led the president to withdraw from his reelection campaign, replaced by Harris.
A six-week burst of Democratic enthusiasm followed, including a spirited Chicago convention, but the race against Trump now has resettled into the coin-flip contest it was before Biden’s debacle, a familiar shape aligned with the nation’s bitter, volatile, schismatic political culture.
With an audience of perhaps 60 million for the debate, and countless more for the deluge of commentary to follow, both candidates know that a single exchange can determine who is deemed the “winner” of the event, as much as any substantive policy discussion.
Here are three key questions that will influence the outcome.
Who Is Kamala Harris?
By far, Harris faces the biggest challenge — and the greatest opportunity — simply because she remains an unknown to many Americans: nearly one in three voters in the latest New York Times poll said they want to know more about her, compared to just 9 percent who said this of Trump, about whom most people’s opinions settled long ago.
With only one national debate in her résumé — her 2020 fly face-off with then–Vice President Mike Pence — Harris faces a very complicated task of communicating multiple messages: her own biography, for starters. She also faces questions about how she differs on policy from Biden, as well as how she has changed since her failed 2019 bid.
The biggest risk: how to react and interact with Trump. Harris needs to stand up to his bullying, in part to demonstrate strength fitting for a Commander in Chief, but must guard against getting dragged into the mud by his expected insults and lies. Harris has long boasted that she would “prosecute the case” against Trump, but it seems far more important to speak directly to voters about what she will do to make their lives better.
Which Trump will show up?
Trump’s caustic buffoonery and daft word-salad pronouncements make it tempting to underestimate him. That is a mistake. First and foremost, presidential debates are Big Television Events, and the longtime reality show star is first and foremost a master TV performer who understands the medium and how to make himself the center of the story.
It’s worth remembering that this will be his seventh presidential debate, more than anyone in history; save for one truly crazed display in 2020, when he secretly was afflicted with COVID, Trump has never hurt himself with that half of the country that supports him — despite verdicts by Beltway big brains that he “lost” to Biden in 2020 and to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
That said, Trump’s strategists are fervently urging and hoping that he restrain his trademark racist, misogynistic, and other personal insults against Harris, in favor of pounding her relentlessly over the economy and immigration, two crucial issues on which voters award him higher marks, as well as the deadly and chaotic U.S. pullout from Afghanistan in 2021, a pivotal event in Biden’s presidency that the Republican has exploited in recent weeks.
What Issues Will Be Centered?
How Harris finesses attacks on policies that represent credible weaknesses, like the economy and immigration, and pivots to more favorable issues, will be consequential.
The more the debate focuses on three other matters, the more she will benefit:
Abortion rights. Trump’s peripatetic efforts to reposition himself over abortion (from loud boasts about his three appointed Supreme Court justices torpedoing Roe v. Wade to claims that people are “absolutely thrilled” with states deciding the matter to now vowing a second term would be “great for women and their reproductive rights”) are telling, because most Americans support the Democratic position. Harris should make him own the high court decision and broaden the issue, explaining the threat Trump poses to contraception, IVF, and other women’s health concerns.
Project 2025. One surprise in the New York Times poll is that Harris attacks about “Project 2025” appear to have broken through into the political mainstream. Trump has tried hard to distance himself from Project 2025, a 900-page document produced by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, three-quarters of which was written by first-term Trump advisers. Among other things, it calls for seizing an unprecedented amount of executive power over the entire government; banning the abortion pill; using the military to deport 11 million immigrants and refugees; ending student loan forgiveness; eliminating Head Start; removing millions from federal low-income health care rolls; and cutting taxes for the wealthy and raising them on the middle class. Harris should aggressively play offense here.
The future. Winning presidential campaigns most often represent change. Harris is strangely positioned, at once the fresh face, representative of a new generation of leaders sounding themes about the future, while also the governing partner of an historically unpopular president. She walks a fine line, in embracing administration successes while distancing herself from Biden on less popular matters. Trump will help on this front, if he returns to his well-worn obsession with the 2020 election, not to mention his promise to wage “bloody” roundups of political enemies.
JR
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