Kamala Harris is under pressure to put on a strong performance in the debate against Donald Trump next week after polling suggested her momentum in the presidential contest could be fading.
The clash in Philadelphia on Tuesday night will be the first between Harris and Trump and may be the last: no other debates have been scheduled before the November vote between the two rivals for the White House.
Both campaigns know that the face-off could be a new inflection point in a 2024 race that has already featured a succession of sudden twists, starting with the dramatic implosion of Joe Biden’s re-election bid following his disastrous June debate against Trump.
Harris will be more in the spotlight, since she is less known than Trump to American voters. According to the FT’s national poll tracker, her lead in the contest has shrunk slightly to 2.9 percentage points in recent weeks, suggesting she received no extra boost from the Democratic convention in Chicago. The closely watched national New York Times-Siena poll released on Sunday showed Trump ahead by 1 percentage point, meaning the race is essentially tied.
Democrats say Harris faces the challenge of introducing herself to Americans who are unfamiliar with her policies but are open to voting for her.
“I think that if Harris shows that she can do in an impromptu environment what she’s done successfully in a relatively scripted way, that will help her — if not decisively, then substantially” said Matt Bennett, a Democratic strategist at Third Way, the centre-left think-tank.
“The problem for Harris is that expectations of Trump are so low. He is always chaotic. He is always bombastic, and he’s going to be that.”
Paul Begala, the veteran Democratic strategist, says a top priority for Harris will be to “define herself as change”. He also said the vice-president needed to “prosecute Trump rather than defend Biden” and “show her youth, vigour, new ideas and cast Trump as old, stale, backward looking”.
Harris chose to prepare for the debate at a hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, the industrial city in western Pennsylvania that could be crucial to the outcome of the election.
While she has given few hints of how she will approach Trump, on a visit to a spice shop on Saturday Harris said she was ready for the showdown. Her message on Tuesday would be that “it’s time to turn the page on the divisiveness, it’s time to bring our country together [and] chart a new way forward,” she told the small crowd.
But even though Harris is known for being a good debater, Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said taking on Trump would not be simple and she must not allow herself to be provoked.
“She basically needs to ignore him. Don’t let him get her goat. Don’t let him fluster her,” he said. “[But] when he is saying rude or ridiculous things, give it to him”.
Rendell added: “Voters want to see, especially with a woman candidate, they want to see a woman who can handle herself, who isn’t going to get cowed, who isn’t going to get bowled over”.
Trump is said to have enlisted Matt Gaetz, the hardline Florida Republican congressman, and Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman, for help in preparing for the debate.
As he often does, Trump has been attacking the hosts of the event at ABC News, suggesting they would be biased against him. He has also resisted a push by Harris to allow microphones to be open throughout the debate, rather than muted when the other candidate is speaking.
But Trump is not doing what mainstream Republicans and party strategists say he should, which is to focus on issues like inflation and immigration where they believe Harris is vulnerable.
On Friday, he called a press conference in New York City but failed to take questions and spent the time railing against his legal troubles and even criticising his own lawyers. After a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday evening, he went on social media to deliver a threat to seek long prison sentences for “those people that cheated” in the counting of the votes in this year’s election.
Harris is not underestimating Trump, however. “We fully expect Donald Trump is going to be ready for the debate, he’s a showman,” said one of the vice-president’s campaign aides, noting that this would be his seventh general election presidential debate, compared to Harris’ first.
Her aim would be to show a clear contrast for voters, the aide said.
“The goal of this debate is to see the choice between vice-president Harris, who is going to set out a vision to make our lives better, to increase economic opportunity, protect our freedoms, and Trump, who is going to be pushing a dark, backwards looking agenda and is only focused on himself,” the aide said.
Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist at Penta Group, said that Harris “still largely remains a blank slate for a lot of voters”.
“Can she offer a concrete vision for the future? Can she define her candidacy beyond the shadow of being Biden’s vice-president?”
Amy Walter, the top political analyst at the non-partisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, wrote in a note this month that “for Harris, success means reassuring swing voters that she isn’t as ‘extreme’ or ‘radically liberal’ as Trump and his allies have suggested”.
“There’s little chance that voters’ opinions of Trump will change. Instead, the big question is whether it impacts the way voters perceive Harris”.