Future generations of Americans might look back on this berserk chapter in the evolution of their country and marvel at how so much depended on what is, ultimately, a television show.
Tuesday night’s ABC debate in Philadelphia (at 2am Irish time) between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump, seeking his second term in office, takes place against the backdrop of a new poll showing that with less than eight weeks remaining, the electorate is almost perfectly divided on who should lead them through the next four years. In that sense, it stands as the most important evening of Harris’s political life.
For better or worse, the American public knows Donald Trump, who was a public figure for decades before he ripped up and remade the Republican Party tradition in his own liking. The weekend New York Times/Siena Poll has Trump narrowly ahead by two points.
But the more relevant number is that 28 per cent of likely voters believe they still need to learn more about Harris before they decide whether she is the candidate for them. Just 9 per cent feel that way about Trump. So, the ABC debate is an hour that offers a rare chance for Harris to win over millions of voters who just aren’t sure. And it’s also an hour filled with peril.
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Too many politicians of both hue have discovered that debating Donald Trump is a vexatious business, from his first incarnation as the maverick outsider who destroyed the field in the Republican primary in 2016 to his most recent debate appearance, against Joe Biden in late June, an hour that marked the nadir of the sitting president’s public performances and ultimately led to his withdrawal from the race.
Harris spent the weekend going through final preparations in a hotel in Pittsburgh. In one of her few public outings, at Penzey’s Spice store, she offered a brief glimpse into the message she is hoping to convey to her national audience this evening.
“It is time to turn the page on the divisiveness. It’s time to bring our country together. Chart a new way forward.”
That won’t be easily achieved. The dilemma for Harris is that she needs to illustrate, in vibrant colours, how her presidency will be a distinct and new departure from the Biden era. But just 25 per cent of respondents in the most recent poll see her as a candidate that “represents change”, as opposed to 53 per cent for Trump. Furthermore, Trump had a five-point lead on the question of who people trust more on the issue that is most important to them.
The economy, border security and reproductive rights stand as the three dominating themes of the election.
Harris must be able to expose the extremism of the Trump/Vance ideology on the issue of abortion rights.
Arguing against Trump’s charge that she was the “border tzar” of the Biden administration will be a tougher task. And somehow persuading voters that she is the right option for the economy is the most critical argument of all.
When poll respondents say they are worried about the economy they are not talking about GDP. They mean their household economy and the charge that inflation has soared over the past four years is impossible to refute. In the waning days of Joe Biden’s campaign, Democratic strategists had their candidate focus less on the esoteric notion of “an existential fight for democracy” and more on to the cost of the eggs, which had become an existential threat to breakfast.
When Harris became the candidate, the surge of goodwill and euphoria created a mood of sunny optimism and a belief, however illusory, that the old dynamic – the dark rhetoric of the past decade – could be somehow evaporated by the communal sense of “joy”, which became the unofficial tagline for the party’s convention in Chicago.
The latest poll may have swept in a colder reality. Donald Trump had come through a personally miserable fortnight – his campaign getting into a row with the custodians of Arlington cemetery; he himself castigated over retweeting a sexually crude and malicious social media post featuring both Harris and Hillary Clinton, whom he sensationally defeated in the 2016 election.
This weekend, he took to X, the Elon Musk forum to which he was reinstated late last month, to warn, in his trademark upper case messaging, about “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery” in the past election and to warn that this year’s vote counting “will be under the closest professional scrutiny and that potential prison sentences will be extended to lawyers, donors, political operatives and election officials”.
The startling aggression of the threat once again laid bare the fact that beneath Trump’s often clownish presentation lies a dangerous and vengeful motivation to atone for an election he continues to insist was “stolen”.
On Monday, the Republican GOP foreign affairs committee released a long report on the Biden-Harris administration’s role in the Afghanistan withdrawal, claiming that it “misled and, in some instances, directly lied to the American people” during the evacuation. The timing of the report is no coincidence.
But it is not so much what Kamala Harris says as how she says it that will register among the audience over the 90-minute exchange. It is her golden, vital chance to convince the people that she is the voice and face they want to hear for the next four years.
Remarkably, it will be the first time Harris and Trump have come together face to face. It’s a meeting that neither will forget.
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